Buy it... if you seek an exotic, rich fantasy score with thematic integrity and grand, tonal schemes while maintaining a persistent sense of dread in its dissonant accompaniment.

Avoid it... if you are easily exhausted by extremely dense, complicated, and emotionally conflicted scores, no matter their beauty.

Navarrete

Pan's Labyrinth: (Javier Navarrete) It's not often that films with two concurrent storylines stand equally as strong as the two in Mexican director Guillermo del Toro's Pan's Labyrinth. A highly complex film with rich connections between its real and fairy tale halves, Pan's Labyrinth is an exploration of both the rebellion against Franco in Spain after World War II and one young girl's imaginative attempts to handle her own horrific place in that struggle. While references to The Wizard of Oz can be made, there should be no doubt that Pan's Labyrinth has no intention of being shown to children, for its concepts are truly disturbing in a gothic, socio-political way. The overwhelming fantasy element in the film does seem to influence the orchestral score more than the realistic and militaristic side of the story. That score is provided by experienced Spanish composer Javier Navarrete, who has served as Del Toro's usual collaborator for his Spanish-language projects (while Marco Beltrami has scored his English-language ones). The task of matching the stunning visuals of Pan's Labyrinth would require an extremely broad and creative approach by Navarrete, whose orchestral knowledge would be more than sufficient for a massive fantasy score. His finished score is definitely a product of the film's gloomy brutality. The ominous environment of Del Toro's bleak designs permeates every moment of the music for Pan's Labyrinth, and Navarrete's elegant style of writing causes the score to have a distinct allure despite its largely harsh and depressing emotional impact. Part of that allure comes from the simple fact that Navarrete's sound will be fresh for most American and mainstream listeners, and his romantic sensibilities will give you a feel similar in intrigue to Dario Marianelli's work for V for Vendetta and The Brothers Grimm. Perhaps it truly takes a European composer to make the darkness so bright with an aural battle of harmony and dissonance; one of the few unfortunate aspects of Pan's Labyrinth is its easy superiority in raw creative power over most of anything the A-list American composers are writing today.

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Apart from the film, Pan's Labyrinth is a score that will abuse you during each listen and yet you can't help but coming back for more. Painted with a large orchestral and choral palette, Navarrete's score is rich with thematic integrity and grand, tonal schemes while also infusing a sense of dread in persistently dissonant accompaniment. The title theme is a lullaby immediately introduced in the form of a humming girl's voice (similar to John Ottman's Hide and Seek). Backed by delicate piano, whimsical strings, and deep vocals in a faint mix, this theme would extend beautifully to "Mercedes Lullaby" and "A Princess." The theme would be interpolated well throughout the two storylines, serving as a strong identity for the score. While its beauty cannot be denied, it's ultimately a cold and inaccessible theme, especially by the film's finale. While the theme may be sparsely rendered in its major performances, the remainder of the score is extremely dense with activity. As the horrors of the real-life storyline continue to unfold in the film, and the connections between them and the fairy tale expose themselves, the score loses its whimsy and slowly shifts its tone to one of horror; this transformation is one of the significantly unique and impressive aspects of Navarrete's score. The romantic attitude developed in "The Labyrinth," "Rose, Dragon," and "The Fairy and the Labyrinth," often led by a truly elegant grand piano mixed will in front of the ensemble, eventually yields to more dissonant confusion in the bone-chilling "Not Human" and "Deep Forest." An abundance of light, tingling percussion and a phenomenally incorporated layering of deep woodwinds, along with the tendency of the choir to resonate deep in the male-voice regions, contribute to the other-worldliness of the score. The straight horror cues, while terrifyingly unlistenable in some regards, continue to maintain your interest simply because of their seemingly exotic constructs, making Pan's Labyrinth a score, at the very least, worth analysis. On its generous, full-length album, Navarrete's score risks becoming an exhausting listening experience (as it was intended to be), but there are no less than twenty minutes of the more harmonically accessible music for fantasy genre fans to enjoy apart from the dissonant influences. There may be no single cue that will rank among the year's best, but the overall impression that Pan's Labyrinth leaves you with is unmistakably powerful. ****   Amazon.com Price Hunt: CD or Download