Track Listing

1. News
2. Introduction/A Prison In The Desert
3. I've Been A Prison Guard Since I Was 18 Years Old
4. I Was 16 When They Put Me In Prison
5. You're Danglin' Us Like a Bunch Of Meat On A Hook
6. Pop Mix
7. We Were United Once
8. Day Of The Murders
9. Lilly's Theme (A Touch Of Warmth)
10. Maynard Mix
11. What I'm Tellin' Is The Truth
12. Free World
13. One Man Released So They Can Impression The Rest Of The World

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #387964 in Music
• Released on: 1993-12-31
• Number of discs: 1
• Format: Soundtrack

Amazon.co.uk Review
For this film about the abhorrent brutality of prison life, the soundtrack lists as composers Nick Cave, Mick Harvey, and Blixa Bargeld--all members of the joyfully morose blues-rock band Nick Cave & the Bad Seeds. However, the score itself--claustrophobic, raw, and harrowing--suggests the output of Bargeld's main band, noise-legends Einsturzende Neubauten. The prominent aspects of the score are prowling scrapes on a violin, low bleats of brass, and a flute or fife that screeches like a cell door swinging on broken, unoiled hinges. The primary focus of the score, though, is the dialogue that runs over the caterwauling sound design. One voice is that of a prisoner named Glover, who lifelessly relates his empty, day-to-day dreams from behind bars. The more visceral stories come from a real-life, former guard at a security prison in the US. In these candid interviews, the listener is barraged with stories of inmates killing each other, guards having to walk through the fresh blood of a stabbed comrade, and the surreal, unsettling image of a warden in a three-piece suit gleefully wrenching the testicles of a naked prisoner. It's awful stuff, but the Ghosts ... of the Civil Dead is a necessary and compelling listen. --Michael Woodring

Customer Reviews

Caught behind musical bars and fences
Concidering the musical explosions and outbursts Nick Cave his crew of Bad Seeds can cause during a performance, this soundtrack to the John Hillcoat movie is surprisingly understated and nihilistic. It’s an atmospherical and moody mix of dimmed music, seemingly lost voice-overs and eerie soundscapes.
The story is set in a futuristic maximum security prison and listening to the soundtrack you can almost hear the electrical wires buzz. There is a tension that never lets go through out the whole album and that can’t be said of most thriller- and horror scores, not even from the so called ‘great names’ in the genre.
High pitched flutes, flares really, are scarcely dropped through out the movie, giving us the creepy feeling of total alienation. The soundscapes on the cd are as desolate as the landscape in which the movie’s prison is standing. One could even speak of a ‘sense of otherworldy’, for both movie and score gives us the strange feeling that the rest of the world, the Common Sense World that is, is gone, and we have become as much a prisoner as the movie characters have and that there is really... really... no way out....