Soundtrack Spotlight: Inferno - Keith Emerson

Argento's follow up to his near-instant classic, Suspiria, was never going to be easy, and like many viewers, it took me a long time to warm to Inferno. When I first saw it in the late 90's, it felt like a watered down version of the earlier film, lacking many of the spectacular set pieces, nasty violence and sheer bonkers nature that set the original apart from the rest of the crowd. I kept coming back to it though, and by around the 3rd viewing it finally clicked with me, and I saw the film for the flawed beauty that it was. It had an incredible visual style that was signature Argento, and the dream logic he was pushing hard in his films never seemed to work quite as well as it did here. Those set pieces were there; they just didn't revolve around bloody murders and instead worked to slowly chip away at the reality surrounding the characters.

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Soundtrack Spotlight: To Live and Die in LA - Wang Chung

"What they recorded has not only enhanced the film - it has given it a deeper, more powerful dimension." - William Friedkin

By the time I had gotten around to watching Friedkin's 'To Live and Die in LA', it was probably some time around the late 90's or early 2000's, at a time when The Exorcist was having a serious dose of re-assessment due to it finally getting a release in the UK on home video. My initial feeling  was one of being less than impressed - it just all seemed a bit 'pedestrian' for Friedkin, the man had, after all, directed one of the best 'rogue cop' movies ever, in the shape of The French Connection - and the film faded from my memory. 

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Soundtrack Spotlight: The Living Dead at Manchester Morgue (1974)

Last week I received a mystery package from my good chum-pal Bill over at Spartak Mixtapes, and when this beauty popped out I was suitably blown away. Bill introduced me to Death Waltz Records last year, when he was showing off his lovely edition of Halloween III's incredible score. Since then they've been high on my radar, but I had yet to thrown down for any of their releases. So thanks Bill, for busting my Death Waltz cherry!

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Soundtrack Spotlight: Klaus Schulze - Angst (1983)

Directed by Gerald Kargl, Angst is one of those rare cinematic oddities in which the soundtrack is more well known than the film itself. This is most likely due to the fact that when it came out, Angst struggled to find a distributor due to the extreme nature of the picture, no doubt any potential buyers saw nothing but censorship headaches and lost money. In many ways they probably weren't wrong; the film is still yet to really find its audience, and cinema only really caught up to Kargl's vision with the release of Gasper Noe's I Stand Alone - no doubt heavily inspired by the earlier film.

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