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Pemberton's approach to Birds of Prey is motific, but the development of the score's several recurring themes takes a back seat to the composer's clearly experimental arranging and recording of them. The tendency to manipulate every element of the mix to death is the ultimate failure of the score, whatever genuine sense of cool heroine bad-ass attitude pummeled by tired, percussive pounding and electronic sound effects ripping with brute force. The ensemble for Birds of Prey's score includes standard rock elements, a handful of vocalists (featuring two female opera singers), a whistler, and an orchestra, though by the time Pemberton's crew is done with all of them, you can't even distinguish what they once were half the time. The orchestra is particularly manipulated to death, only the intentionally detuned strings of the villain's motif prevailing somewhat organically in "The Black Mask Club" and "Roman Sionis." A potentially inspiring symphonic crescendo late in "Work Together" fails to exude any dynamism whatsoever. The composer used a 303 Roland, what Pemberton calls a "sort of a synthesizer but more of a bass line generating machine" to produce vintage video game-worthy effects that he deems "mad electronic sounds" for rave culture. Basic, free samples would have sufficed just the same for 99.99% of movie-goers. He has expressed pride in the tubular bells included in the recording, too, but they're not readily identifiable in the final mix, either. Meanwhile, the "Breakout!" cue utilizes overt snoring sounds as a pace-setter in one of the more bizarre pieces of film music to ever exist. The female singers perform in quasi-vintage Ennio Morricone mode to represent the gender at work here, but while they open the film with some distinction for Pemberton's emancipation theme for Quinn ("Flying High"), their contributions become so badly manipulated by the climax of the score that you can't really tell that they were once female opera singers making screaming sounds, negating the whole point. Pemberton remains proud of this creativity, mentioning that he even incorporated a crazed sample of someone singing "Cuckoo Cuckoo" into a fight sequence.

If all of this sounds like a solid recipe for insanity, you'd be right, and to combat the disorienting instrumental choices, the composer does offer several themes that don't really receive as much development as he suggests he intended. The aforementioned emancipation theme extends from "Flying High" (with the opera singers) to "Birds of Prey" and "The Fantabulous Emancipation Explosion." These cues are the most palatable in the score, the latter two exhibiting a deeper sense of coolness befitting the character. The rollicking "Harley Quinn" cue, the basis for the "Danger Danger" song, is her main theme and eventually joins her emancipation theme in the climactic "Fight Together" medley of defiance. A handful of secondary themes exist for secondary characters, the most notable and recognizable a flute motif for the Huntress that accompanies her side-story in "The Bertinelli Massacre" and "The Bertinelli Revenge" before a prominent statement in "Roller vs Rollers." The Black Canary meanwhile, receives a more nebulous, whistled motif in "Bad Ass Broad" and, aside from "Zsasz Showdown," is underdeveloped in the remainder of the score. Pemberton points to "Fight Together" as the most challenging cue in the work, combining Quinn's two themes and the Huntress theme, though there's really nothing extraordinary about how he layers the ideas in that scene. It's good, but not all that impressive. Cues like "I Want to Kill You Because I Can" and "Zsasz Showdown" offer ambient boredom of little value. Oddball jazzy infusions in "Bruce and the Beaver" and "Femme Fatale" play like source cues, though the former at least offers the female singers a chance to shine. For some listeners, the same could be said of the bittersweet "Lotus Flower," though this mass of comparatively subdued material in the middle third of the score really drags the pace of the listening experience. Together, these passages have nothing in common with the outright rock action blasting in "Lockdown" and "Battle Commence," the score's schizophrenic nature on album totally fatal despite the faint shreds of motific development that Pemberton tries to weave throughout. It's yet another stream of consciousness product from a composer whose works tend to sound like manic misfires more often than not. In the end, though, some listeners will become totally absorbed by Pemberton's atmosphere and forget that his experimentation actually makes for piss-poor film music much of the time.   @Amazon.com: CD or Download

• Music as Written for the Film:  **
• Music as Heard on Album:  *
• Overall:  *

Total Time: 61:52