The basic foundation of Haslinger's music for the original Underworld endures in this fourth movie in the franchise, but its trademark instrumentation is tempered by orchestral techniques that reside far closer to current blockbuster convention. Grating metallic effects, thrashing percussion, dominant bass tones, and whining electric guitars are still active players in Underworld: Awakening, but their impact has been diminished by the greater role of an orchestra and choir. With his approach to The Three Musketeers in 2011, Haslinger confirmed that he was, by choice or necessity, steering his career towards the sound made famous by Hans Zimmer and his Remote Control production house. Thus, you hear him providing muscular string ostinatos for vampires and lycans while exploring melodramatic tonality for the sensitive character scenes. His execution of these techniques is rather simplistic, reflecting The Three Musketeers in its relative lack of sophistication and sounding like a clone of Trevor Rabin (but without that composer's knack for catchy themes). In an ambient sense, Haslinger earned his pay with Underworld: Awakening, handling each facet of the score with appropriately brutal or sad tones. The "Main Titles" and "Find Her and Destroy Her" are typical RC marches of rhythmic bravado. The piano loneliness of the prior scores' slower moments returns in "This is Not One of Us" and "You Came Back," the latter a Mark Snow-like cue. The best moments in the score, ironically, are those in which Haslinger reprises the ugliest mayhem from the first score, the pair of "The Uber-Lycan" and "A New Dawn" finally tapping that original, raw energy of a mostly synthetic nature. But the problem that has plagued these scores from the very start has been cohesion, and Underworld: Awakening once again meanders along without forming any kind of narrative arc. There are no prominent themes once again, the popular use of "Eternity and a Day" as the love theme in the first score only suggested briefly in "The Melancholy of Resistance" (with subtle female voice mixed periodically in the cue for single notes) and the primary theme from Underworld still largely absent from the sequels despite the direct line of narrative in the stories. Like Underworld: Rise of the Lycans, Haslinger teases listeners with passages that almost combine his uniquely electronic mannerisms with the RC sound in an ultimate hybrid mixture (which would seem appropriate, given the plot of these movies), but he never follows that path. A score-only album with three compatible songs at the end may be a guilty pleasure for some, but it doesn't advance the franchise's music in any coherent direction.  **   @Amazon.com: CD or Download