Elliot Goldenthal is one of my favourite composers; in fact, he may be my favourite American film composer at the moment. The clarity and depth to his orchestral writing is unparalleled and he has produced some of film music's finest albums of the last decade or so. His last couple of scores though have been departures for him - the Hispanic-flavoured Frida wowed most critics but I didn't think it was nearly as interesting as most of his orchestral scores, and now The Good Thief sees the composer in urban jazz territory. It's Goldenthal's latest collaboration with Neil Jordan, the last being In Dreams a few years ago, which produced an excellent album.

The album features eight tracks of score, running to just under 25 minutes, along with eight songs. "Lucky Eyes" opens the score selections with a mournful sax solo; several of the tracks that follow are almost industrial in nature, especially "Snake 5" and "36 Hadjini Street", with their bleak soundscapes buoyed by electronic percussion. A highlight for many will be "Waltz for Anna", a beautiful piece for piano, strings and harmonica.

Most of the cues are really very short, and it's not until the final track on the album, the nine-minute "Redemption Rehearsal", that we get any sort of extended writing. It's certainly the standout piece, combining the various aspects of the score into one long piece of music. All in all, this is probably Goldenthal's least interesting scores - only very briefly (during the final track) does it explode into the kind of orchestral mayhem he does so brilliantly, and hearing that makes you long for so much more of the same. Clearly the film did not demand such writing and the blacker-than-night soundscape the composer has crafted is perfect for the thriller, but I have to say that in this instance, most of the songs are rather more interesting than the score.

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