Buy it... if you can appreciate any Christopher Young horror score as long as it features deep choral chants and periodic moments of lavish, orchestral harmony.

Avoid it... if you consider Hellraiser II and The Fly II to be the pinnacle of Young's horror writing and want to avoid any lesser incarnations of that music.

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Bless the Child: (Christopher Young) It is not often that films have to deal with real life timing when considering their production schedules, but the date January 1, 2000 had a special significance for the plethora of films dealing with primitive fears involving religious turmoil and, potentially, the end of the world. The best known entry in this predictable stock was End of Days, which was timed perfectly to dwell upon ridiculous Y2K fears. And then there was Bless the Child, the Kim Basinger and Jimmy Smits film that had a remarkably identical plot to End of Days but was plagued by a different kind of disaster. The Paramount production was re-written, re-shot, and re-edited extensively, pushing its release date well into 2000 and thus rendering the film somewhat moot. Not surprisingly, the incredibly bad timing that resulted from the delay, as well as the rehashing of the familiar, old gateway-to-hell scenario, led the film down the forgotten path to oblivion. Such cinematic floundering was no new experience for composer Christopher Young, who would often write noteworthy horror music for films that were destined to hit a brick wall and fail miserably at the box office. Unfortunately, Bless the Child was such a case once again, with Young hired to provide his classic horror sensibilities to a film that certainly didn't deserve such orchestral majesty and choral ruckus. This score in particular was reassuring to enthusiasts of Young's horror music, because at the turn of the century, Young was leaving this mode of music behind and dabbling in more electric organ-laced jazz for his newly discovered genre of arthouse drama. So despite the similarities that the music for Bless the Child shares with a number of previous Young horror scores, it was important for fans to know that the horror master could conjure a massive effort for the genre whenever necessary, regardless of the composer's experimentation with different, less ominous topics. Of course, Young would make the horror and suspense genres a staple of his later 2000's production, but the menacing choral style of Bless the Child still stands as a distinct entry in the composer's career and, not surprisingly, remains a favorite for many of his listeners.

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The score for Bless the Child does not feature the same awe-inspiring thematic development as Young's work for Hellraiser II or The Fly II, which established him as a leader in the area of overwhelming, Gothic themes. There are several twenty-second blasts of harmonious terror in Bless the Child, but never the sustained material of highly listenable resonance that remains famous in Young's best works. On the other hand, he does maintain a more consistent underscore for Bless the Child, alternating between strong, highly effective dissonance and traditional choral chants. The deep male chants perform a simplistic "rowing motif" (they sound as though they could come right out of a Viking film, with a forceful, throaty edge to their performance). As expected, there are some lighter, upper range choral performances for moments of religious awe. But Young doesn't back them up with the full pounding of the orchestra as he had in other scores. There is no cymbal-crashing exclamation point on the measures, and at times the bass strings provide less of the deep accompaniment than the score could have used. The performers of the London Metropolitan Orchestra don't seem to flourish with the same lavish enthusiasm that performers have exhibited in similar recordings of Young's horror music. The result of the occasionally less than stellar orchestral sound (and this may be due to any one of many factors, including diminished group size) is that the score falls back into a more predictable mode of presentation. Young's horror music always walks that fine between cliche and innovation, a standard he created largely by himself in the late 1980's, and without an overwhelming performance, the score can leave you wanting more power behind the familiar motifs. The only truly hindering motif is a light, cascading one for percussion that is straight from Alan Silvestri's Back to the Future, but that's more likely a coincidence more than anything else. A boy soprano also brings back memories of John Debney's End of Days. Young counters with the use of a very memorable Middle Eastern woodwind effect to enhance the biblical weight of the religious implications on screen. And the underscore, while dissonant in many sections, is sufficiently interesting to keep the listener going. If Young hadn't already explored this score's foundations before with more tantalizing results, Bless the Child would be a four-star effort. ***   Amazon.com Price Hunt: CD or Download

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For Christopher Young reviews at Filmtracks, the average editorial rating is 3.3 (in 23 reviews) and the average viewer rating is 2.99 (in 7,951 votes). The maximum rating is 5 stars.