Robert Hood: Omega (CD, M-Plant, June 2010)

This is the Detroit legend's imaginary soundtrack for the 1971 movie The Omega Man, a zombie-apocalypse sci-fi job starring Charlton Heston and featuring a hefty Christian subtext. I'll admit now that I haven't seen the movie or heard Ron Grainer's score, so for me the film itself is imaginary. Still, the album holds up very nicely by itself. It isn't Hood's most propulsive work — which is to say, it is a very very propulsive, kick-driven piece of action, it just doesn't pummel my cranium quite as hard or as relentlessly as, say, Minimal Nation or his 2008 Fabric mix. This gives plenty of room for his skittering snare patterns, and an impressive array of bloops and squawks, and the beat is as complex and shifting as I could ask for. The format lends itself to a more, yes, cinematic approach... but it's good to hear someone doing this without sounding remotely ambient.

(I should admit one reservation, which is that I have a hard time taking the dedication in the liner notes seriously: it comes across like a cross between one of Gwyneth Paltrow's Oscar acceptance speeches and the "Oh Lord, you as so big, so absolutely huge" prayer from Monty Python's Meaning Of Life. I don't mean to disrespect his faith — I don't have a problem with that, but rather with the cringe-making fashion in which it is expressed. But, hey, this doesn't make the music any worse.)

I bought this from Juno.

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