Vampires: Music From The Motion Picture
Director John Carpenter also takes on the musician mantle in this alternately loud, moody, and sometimes raunchy interpretation of how a movie should sound when it melds the vampire and Western genres. The opening track misleads us into thinking the album is all about Southwestern sawdust barroom blues, but there is an ample amount of what Carpenter calls "heavy-breathing horror stuff" to make this a credibly scary soundtrack. There are plenty of contemplative and eerie interludes. The pairing of soft but menacing pedal-steel guitar and Carpenter's synthesizer on "Headless Priest" and Carpenter's own tune set to Spanish guitar (what he admits is a "riffing off" of Dimitri Tiomkin's "De Guello" forRio BravoandThe Alamo) give this otherwise uneven assortment some atmospheric bite.--Joseph Lanza