After the Dark: Music from The Philosophers

Korn frontman Jonathan Davis collaborated with veteran cinema and television composer Nicholas O'Toole on the score for this horror film from John Huddles. Though it's been a while, this is actually Davis' second time at the movies: he previously co-composed original tracks for Queen of the Damned with Richard Gibbs. Comprised of 31 mostly short synth cues (the longest is four minutes, with the vast majority clocking in between two and three), the music here is as generic as it gets. It's standard video game stuff mostly. That said, some of the editing is laughable. There are radical dynamic shifts on the recording without the benefit of any transitions between sections -- as if one cue were grafted literally onto the end of another just before it ended. The score feels like a series of discontinuous parts rather than a whole. And this may be true because four other cues (actually two, which are variants of one another) were written by Glen Phillips. They employ bells, gongs, cymbals, and other percussion that at least break up the plastic-sounding textural monotony. This is a must-avoid.