An occasional writer's journal

Who better than doomly Australian writer and musician Nick Cave to score a movie about the end of the world?

His soundtrack to the post-apocalyptic film The Road, the latest screen collaboration with Bad Seeds bandmate Warren Ellis, is being released digitally ahead of the movie’s opening on November 25.

Director John Hillcoat’s latest collaboration with Cave is an adaptation of the Cormac McCarthy book, starring Viggo Mortensen. The Road is sure to feature the kind of sparse, world-weary violin and piano that defined Hillcoat’s superb Australian outback western The Proposition (2005).

Despite fine performances by screen legends John Hurt and Ray Winstone, and the English-born Australian actor Guy Pearce of Memento fame, the Cave/Ellis score was the true star of The Proposition. Its mournful drone is heard constantly over the buzzing of flies to evoke the ever-nearing approach of death.

The music is as memorable as the movie itself. It transcends the imagery in the way Neil Young’s electric guitar redefined the western in Dead Man, director Jim Jarmusch’s surreal odyssey starring Johnny Depp. Incidentally, Cave and Ellis also collaborated on the 2007 movie The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford.

Cave’s darkly spiritual compositions are an antidote for the superficiality of Hollywood offerings typically hyped in association with the recording industry and its pop video offshoots. Paradoxically, his script for a sequel to the Ridley Scott blockbuster Gladiator (2001) was rejected by the studio.

As reported by Pitchfork,  Cave and Ellis’s original music for The Road will be available digitally on November 23 on Mute with a physical release to follow on January 12. They earlier released a compilation of scoring work called White Lunar.