Although the title Cult Cuts might make for a mildly amusing fractured cliché, this album, a compilation of tracks drawn from Silva Screen Records' library of re-recordings of film music, doesn't actually feature music from cult movies. The term "cult" is subjective, to be sure, but it's hard to call a film a cult picture when it has grossed upwards of $100 million and been up for, or won, a number of Academy Awards, and the selection here includes such Best Picture winners as Crash and The Departed. In fact, most of the movies are Hollywood favorites of one sort or another. A better description is the subtitle, "Music from the Modern Cinema," since, while the films cover the years 1968 to 2006, in fact 12 of the 16 tracks come from movies of the 1990s and 2000s. To the extent to which they can be considered typical, they suggest that film music, influenced by decades of rhythm-heavy rock, has become somewhat less orchestral. Indeed, although the back cover credits the performances on the album to the City of Prague Philharmonic Orchestra (Silva Screen's workhorse for building its catalog) and
London Music Works (whatever that is), the Prague appears on only eight of the tracks. Two cuts, the
Lalo Schifrin compositions from Dirty Harry and Bullitt, are performed by
National Youth Jazz Orchestra, and the rest either by
London Music Works or the equally generic-sounding London Ensemble, both probably pseudonyms for people laboring over hot synthesizers and computers. This is music for thrillers and high-profile dramas, with plenty of pounding beats and unusual sounds, culminating in
Tyler Bates' heavy metal effort, "Fever Dream," from the live-action cartoon 300. This is not the music of cult cinema, except to the extent that modern cinema addresses itself to several large cults of consumers, but it does give a good sense of the kind of music being made for the more popular efforts at the local multiplex in the late 20th and early 21st century. ~ William Ruhlmann