This peculiar-sounding tale of two boys who get bored with their lives in a parish school in the 1970s and so invent a fantasy world of their own to live in received mostly rave reviews.  Jodie Foster doesn't work much these days, and when she does it tends to be in films where you wouldn't expect to find her, and this is most certainly one of those; she also produced it.  Director Peter Care enlisted Marco Beltrami for the music, with Joshua Homme also contributing some tracks (mostly, it seems, for the comic-book sequences).

Indeed, some of the most striking music on the album is actually Homme's (I'd never even heard of him previously).  Tracks 1, 5, 10, 11 and 20 are his, totalling about 11 minutes; Beltrami has about 24 minutes; and there are two songs.  The album opens with Homme's "The Atomic Trinity", an enjoyable piece of instrumental rock; Homme's other cues include the soft guitar piece "Hanging" and a couple more soft rock tracks.

Beltrami's first cue, "The Atomic Trinity vs Heaven's Devils", is a surprisingly lovely piece, full of feeling.  Beltrami actually writes a few scores like that, but very few of them get released - to my money they're infinitely better than the various second-rate horror scores he writes, all of which do invariably see album releases.  Elsewhere Beltrami's music goes through all sorts of changes.  It's made up mostly of very short, self-contained vignettes, for various different small ensembles.  There's some Thomas Newman-ish quirkiness to several of the tracks which adds to their appeal; others are in the pop instrumental vein; and others are straight dramatic cues, reminding me a little of Mark Isham's more dramatic scores (which is no bad thing).

This is a very odd but rather rewarding album which shows off a different - and arguably far more impressive - side of Beltrami.  The album's just too all over the place to be entirely satisfying, but I hope Beltrami scores a few more sensible movies (and they get score releases) because he clearly has a knack for it.

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Tracks