Stieg Larsson’s mega-selling gruesome Millennium crime novels, featuring the dysfunctional dark heroin Lisbeth Salander, have captured the imagination of fans and have become a publishing sensation with sales of 30m+ worldwide. Silva Screen Records's soundtrack release contains themes heard throughout all three films but principally, the album features the soundtrack to the second and third film and includes the theme used for the full-length TV versions. Also features the end credit Goth-rock song 'Would Anybody Die For Me?', specially remixed for the album and performed by Danish singer Misen Larsen as featured in the second film...

Stieg Larsson's Millennium trilogy has become something of a publishing sensation in the author’s native Sweden and beyond - it’s ingenious paring of the political journalist Blomkvist and his socially dislocated female sidekick Lisbeth Salander has seen the three books sell millions worldwide, helping rewrite the crime novel genre along the way.

And fortunately for fans of the books it was Swedish TV that first snapped up the rights to dramatise the trilogy, not Hollywood. The six episodes, edited together into three films for theatrical release, are dark, brooding affairs, as befits the original text. This is Sweden by Swedes for Swedes - no compromises, just as Blomkvist and Salander might have liked it.

Jacob Groth’s music, hardly surprisingly, is also dark and brooding - a sound palette of slate grey and burnt umber, mixed in long smudges of sound. And when experienced in combination with the movies it works really well, but as a stand-alone musical experience it’s not really terribly absorbing stuff. There are simply not enough textures to make it work as an interesting entity in its own right.

It fairness this CD contains music selected from all three films and the tracks chosen are thematically linked [by their downbeat mood] -- a sensible move, perhaps, when compiling a single disc release. However, it’s still a shame that there’s not more ‘light’ in the selection as end-to-end darkness can get boring after a while.

The sole change of feel is the song ‘Would Anybody Die For Me?’; a slice of teen Goth angst so overwrought with ‘I won’t tidy my room’ fury that it’s funny, albeit for only a moment. Worse still, it kicks along without every really taking flight. Where are those power chords and big drums?

This is [bad] mood music and I don’t want to listen to music that summons up bad moods. Maybe the Swedes have a dourer outlook to which this fits but for me it was just too wearisome.

Go see the films, go read the books, just don’t buy the soundtrack unless you’re especially keen on doom-laden chord changes.

5

Anthony Clark