Let’s make it two Pitchfork links in the row. I went to buy this 2CD compilation of the great Italian film composer Ennio Morricone’s 1960s and ’70s work for a variety of crime and other genre movies this weekend, and it was sold out everywhere. So, my review will have to wait, but here’s Pitchfork’s Joe Tangari with his take on Ennio Morricone: Crime and Dissonance, the album compiled by Allan Bishop and Mike Patton.

An excerpt:

“More than setting the tone for Western scores for a generation, Morricone’s greatest legacy is perhaps the way he used sound elementally, largely disregarding the expectations his captive listeners had of guitars, orchestras and percussion in favor of combinations that captured very specific moods in a way most traditional soundtracking methods simply couldn’t. His music is often hard to pin emotionally for the same reasons– the emotion we so frequently draw from music is largely a result of the harmonic cliches we learn to associate with certain feelings, and he doesn’t use any of those cliches in these pieces. Crime & Dissonance is perhaps the most essential Morricone compilation out there in that, in skipping hits like the theme from The Good, the Bad & the Ugly, it captures his darkest, most adventurous material, shedding light on a part of his career that hasn’t been explored deeply enough.”