There has been much banter about how intelligently Jóhannsson's music for Sicario is constructed. Mostly acoustic at its root, the score still features synthetic manipulation that either dulls the environment or intentionally supplies a clipping effect to the mostly percussive performances. An orchestra exists to growl most of the time, bass strings and brass presenting the score's only recurring motif (a descending minor-third slur heard first in "The Beast" and again in "Tunnel Music") while a percussive heartbeat effect connects sequences in between. The composer throws in subtle orchestral colors here and there, as in "Convoy," but these occasional chirps are not the norm. Expect the key to stay the same throughout every cue, the notes to rarely shift and what little melody exists to be fragmented. Fuller ensemble cues present only broken chord whole notes of despair, as heard throughout the pivotal "Balcony" cue at the end. The problem with this music is not that it really isn't music at all, but that it's not that intelligent in the first place. There's no narrative poignancy within the music itself, and when Jóhannsson begins to explore such territory in the final two cues, the first with child vocals dominated by the main two motifs in conjunction ("Soccer Game") and the latter with nearly insufferable layering of the vocals as a theme for del Toro's vigilante, he fails to adequately develop any kind of catharsis other than increased amplification and the suggestion of dead children with the vocals. A cue for an important scene such as "Fausto," for instance, accomplishes nothing that a sound effects editor couldn't do by sampling the sound of industrial machinery and manipulating it. When you couple that atmosphere with the highly repetitive nature of every cue, the same tone, key, and meter employed from the fade-in to the fade-out, you have an extremely boring and simplistic work. Don't believe all the hype you hear about "subtleties" in this score, because outside the skittish layers of the ensemble in "Convoy," and "Night Vision," you hear very little actual creativity in this work. The electronic distortions of basic percussive rhythms are eye-rolling, a cue like "Surveillance" the kind of noisy muck that any inexperienced composer could generate without a second thought. Even as a horror score, which it definitely is, the work doesn't make much attempt to present a dichotomy of good and evil where one exists, the sole respite in "Melancholia" for solo acoustic guitar in no way reflecting the true battle of wills in the character interactions. Overall, the score for Sicario rumbles like a beast as intended, and it achieves its very basic function as yet another layer of dirty, dreadful haze in the film, but music like this has little purpose on album. It's an ordinary and insufferable ordeal.   @Amazon.com: CD or Download