3 out of 5

Produced by: Ramin Djawadi

Label: Lakeshore

The quiet subtleties featured on most of Ramin Djawadi’s horror soundtrack for The Unborn initially make it come across as but a sequence of creepy cues, with occasional jump scare bursts of strings.  Other surface indicators suggest the same: the general short, two minute track duration; the clear focus on the opening track as the one extended theme to rule them all.  …And listening to the score like this – as cues – does it a disservice.  Unborn is actually a pretty tight experience, if over-extended when it essentially recycles the same tricks after the score’s / film’s halfway point.  And there is, also, that misleading opener, which definitely sets us up with the theme that the remaining tracks hauntingly echo, but does so in a rather big budget horror digital “cool” way, sounding a bit over-serious, reminiscent of the music played during Saw’s endless tape recorder reveals.  The track is super groovy the first go around, and makes the more patient stuff that follows more difficult to parse, but once your ears adjust to the latter, the opener sounds hollow.

So what we’re after is that adjustment: with the volume up, all those short cues actually slink into one another really well, spookily affecting Djawadi’s main theme in various fashions – which is sort of lullaby like, and maybe slightly similar to Komeda’s Rosemary’s Baby theme – and then at some perfect intervals (Twins, Experiments), allowing the jump to a terrifying buildup of noise.  The ambient experimentation heard on Djawadi’s earlier Mr. Brooks work is sharpened up here significantly, polished to be more organic sounding, and tightened up by that drifting, thematic linking.

Again, at about midway through, you’ve essentially heard what the album has to offer, though as it’s quite enjoyable, circling through another round isn’t an outright tragedy.

While initial passes may convince you that Unborn is another generic “creepy clatter with pulses of strings” horror soundtrack, I’d encourage another listen – specifically past the first track, and with the volume up to catch the subtleties.  Ramin would go on to make much stronger scores, but Unborn may have been the first time he really stepped further out from the Zimmer model and started to more boldly define his methods.