Buy it... only if you seek a loyal souvenir from the film, for the score offers little to engage the listener on its own and the album release contains significant sound effects from the final edit of the production.

Avoid it... if you expect your vampire scores to exude a convincing sense of romantically gothic tragedy, a trait largely absent from this work.

Shadow of the Vampire: (Dan Jones) For this obscure, early 2001 BBC film produced by Nicholas Cage, it might have come as a surprise for some film score collectors to find posters for this movie in the theatres without the name of the composer (or any music-related credit at all). The score for Shadow of the Vampire had seemingly become an afterthought, overshadowed by the sheer popular weight of the highly advertised lead acting performances by John Malkovich and Willem Dafoe. The film's unique perspective, offering the viewers the opportunity to watch the production of the classic and silent 1922 classic Nosferatu in the making, and the frightfully dark avenues down which the director goes to make it authentic, required a score that accomplished two goals. First, the music needed to reflect the tinny, melodramatic, string-dominated scores for those films themselves, and second, the music had to encapsulate that intangible gothic feeling that any good vampire film would provide nowadays. What British composer Daniel T. Jones (a relative newcomer to the spotlight) produced is a sort of whimsical combination of the two, staying a step out of the way of the light, not much unlike the vampire, and not much unlike the lack of the composer's name on the movie poster. Despite the hype generated by especially Dafoe's performance as the vampire, Shadow of the Vampire was a disappointment to most, failing to achieve a strong worldwide audience. The music for Shadow of the Vampire also promises more than it ultimately delivers. Outside of several source-like interruptions, the score meanders reflectively in murky depths for its entire length, with only two or three bright spots worthy of specific mention.

While the performance by the BBC National Orchestra of Wales is certainly adequate in its accuracy and power, achieving the level of necessary intensity with ease, the players' lack of dynamic romantic embrace is a troublesome element that may have been intended by the composer. But it is this absence of genuine fright and awe, even the moments of dark delight, that causes the score for Shadow of the Vampire to wander off into an uninteresting cloud of ambiguity. There are a few area in which Jones excels greatly in Shadow of the Vampire, all technical. His emulation of Eastern European sensibilities in his tone, rhythms, and progressions, is appropriate and unmistakable. His re-creation of the violin performances that accompanied such old horror films is well interpolated into many cues. At the same time, however, he neglects the romantic, gothic, and brooding element of the vampire's demeanor, causing the work to convey only a cold chill without any sense of attachment that such scores otherwise attempt to attain. The lack of harmony in almost every cue is to be expected; it was a trademark of that specific period of music, and the film's dark story requires a certain amount of dissonant lines. But without the gothic drive and power, the remaining music hovers in the treble without seemingly clear direction. Cues for opulent societal scenes, like the sung "Herr Doktor" and the elegant piano and violin duet in "A Concert in Wismar," are distractions from the otherwise consistent narrative. A couple of waltz pieces sprinkled throughout (which offer, ironically, the most outward character in the score) are likewise necessary, but create a fragmented listening experience. In the mass of the brooding underscore, the lack of a title theme for either of the two characters leads to several underdeveloped motifs that often wash away into near silence.

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In fact, there are over ten minutes on this album that are so inaudible that your stereo will need to be turned way up in volume just to hear the strings and woodwinds quiver and flutter, not to mention the effects taken directly from the final cut of the film. Those sound effects and dialogue present another problem with the album. The film has plenty of classic lines of dialogue to be included on the album (such as the classic "...I'll eat her later."), and yet none of them can be heard on the Pacific Time product. Instead, both elements mixed extensively throughout the album are presented at such low volumes and distant clarity that they become a form of percussive accompaniment for the orchestra. For the lengthy moments of very sparse underscore, these mixings are fine in concept, despite the fact that their low volume sometimes makes them into distracting whispers. At other points, laughing, applause, or footsteps will suddenly interrupt the music, clipping the end of a cue without warning. The opening of the album, though, is an exception; the combination of a bell tolling, screaming of a woman, footsteps, and frantic voices was a good way to start things off, even though they were mixed too softly as well. Overall, this album has many peculiarities. Along with the dissonant and minimalistic meanderings of the score to the constant intervention of dialogue and sound effects, the album also suffers from an illogical choice of arrangement and slightly incorrect track attribution in the notes. Other tracks seem mislabeled upon a casual listen. The two tracks titled "The Bunker" are identical. Ultimately, Shadow of the Vampire offers only two truly strong cues worthy of compilation. Outside of the marginally harmonic crescendos of powerful strings and woodwinds in "The Light of the Sun" and (late in) "Title Music," there isn't enough engaging material to pull this poorly-mixed album from the dreary depths of dismal melancholy. **   Amazon.com Price Hunt: CD or Download