Buy it... if you can turn off your brain long enough to enjoy the enthusiastic arrangement and grand execution of a guilty pleasure score that borrows much from the temp track and uses cool but nonsensical ethnic tones.

Avoid it... if you're the intellectual sort of film score collector for whom a series of borrowed ideas, themes, and cliches cannot possibly be arranged into any listenable package.

Dust to Glory: (Nathan Furst) While most people probably haven't heard of the Baja 1000 event in Baja California, Mexico, it's a fully sponsored auto race that has the distinction of being the world's longest non-stop point-to-point race. All sorts of vehicles inhabit the same course, from race cars worth millions of dollars to motorcycles and Volkswagen Beetles. The actual course changes from year to year and features secret checkpoints that make it risky, though still legal, to take shortcuts. From dirt roads to actual Mexican highways (where racers not only have to weave around regular civilian traffic, but can get pulled over by the cops for speeding), the race takes drivers on a perilous journey that has different records for each class of vehicle. The speedy ones can complete the course in 16 hours, and the slowpokes have to do it in 32 hours to even qualify as a winner. Most vehicles don't even make it to the finish line, with injuries and even deaths (to drivers and spectators who stand along the edge of the road to watch) not uncommon. Big name drivers and celebrities, from Mario Andretti to James Garner and Steve McQueen, have participated. The 2005 documentary Dust to Glory, written and directed by Dana Brown and released by IFC Films, chronicles the 2003 race with 50 cameras following the action from both the sidelines and from mounts on the vehicles themselves. The footage is spectacular and provides many splendid moments for both motorheads and those who enjoy the vistas of North Mexico's landscape. The music for the documentary contains a variety of kick-ass rock songs, but at 97 minutes in length, the picture also required a considerable amount of original score. The director and producer sought a score that was "valiant, ethnic, and exciting," but modern to the ears. Their temp score of choice seems to have been Gladiator, but with Hans Zimmer and his associates far from budgetary means, the attorney for the filmmakers suggested 25-year-old composer Nathan Furst. Untested on a large scale, Furst was a risk for the project, but his success in adapting the sound they would need for Dust to Glory manifested itself in the form of what was undoubtedly the young composer's most ambitiously grandiose piece of music to date and among the best works of his television-centered career thereafter. The intent of the score was to purely emulate a large-scale orchestral score, and although live players are discernable throughout, a heavy amount of Zimmer-like processing (and electronics at work as well) give the music a distinctly synthetic sound at times.

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Despite its rambunctious personality and many overachieving sensibilities, Dust to Glory is a very flawed score in two fundamental regards. First, nearly every cue is saturated with the influences of the scores that were either mentioned to Furst by the filmmakers as examples of acceptable music or outright used as temp material for the film. Secondly, the ethnic elements in the score are distinctly Middle-Eastern and have nothing to do with Baja California. That said, Furst's approach is likely to be a guilty pleasure to any film score listener despite these flaws, and the score is more than sufficient for its context. Harmonically simple and rhythmically pleasing, the music is fluid and well balanced in its instrumentation. A cue like "Sharing Dust" can have vibrant, dynamic performances by solo instruments such as piano, acoustic guitar, or voice, while action cues can stir you out your seat with their ensemble intensity and depth. The ethnic percussion underneath the synthetic and real orchestral elements uses the same balance and rhythmic progressions as Brian Tyler's Children of Dune, though Dust to Glory also shares the 2003 work's uncanny knack for reminding you other scores at nearly every turn. Much of the straight action material, culminating in "The Beach," contains nearly a note-for-note borrowing of the coliseum sequences in Zimmer's Gladiator, and that score's main theme's progressions are present in the latter half of one of Furst's primary ideas. Other melodic influences vary from the obvious to the curious; in "One More Mile," a highlight cue with an outstanding rhythmic climax, Furst exhibits one theme (heard frequently in the score) seemingly inspired by the "fields" theme of Mychael Danna's Exotica and then calls upon another melody one in the form of hip guitar performances from Robert Rodriguez's Once Upon a Time in Mexico. Pieces of James Newton Howard float in and out randomly. Commonly popular female solo and choral vocal applications are also plentiful in Dust to Glory, perhaps a cliche by definition but very enjoyable in more cerebral cues such as "Weatherman" and "Night Visions." Specialty instrumental tones originating from the Middle East to Australia are littered throughout. It is perhaps difficult to recommend Dust to Glory to the learned film score collector, because on album, with its unrelated songs scattered throughout and with so many obvious temp-track influences, the music is far from intelligent mastery. But if you can set aside the obvious head-scratching curiosities and enjoy the enthusiastic arrangement and grand execution of the score (as well as its crisp, bass-friendly recording), then you'll be steering yourself towards one very pleasant surprise. ****   Amazon.com Price Hunt: CD or Download