While Drag Me to Hell has a few secondary paths of exploration that will remind listeners of the likes of Untraceable and The Uninvited (and Copycat and Jennifer 8 if you go back further), Young took the opportunity that Raimi presented him to write music of a grand scale not often conveyed in the genre. The resulting carnival of explosive waltzes and unconventional stingers overshadows the moments of eerie atmosphere and sympathetic character material in Drag Me to Hell. While the quality of this score is equal to, if not greater than, Young's remarkable fantasy scores (such as Species and The Fly II), this entry is so overwhelmingly wild in its approach to the topic that it has no chance of translating into a fluid listening experience. It's a highly compartmentalized score, despite the effective insertion of the overarching title theme into a multitude of facets, and the whole is easily divided into four major components. The title theme and its virtuoso violin performances are one distinct highlight, opening and closing the soundtrack album with gruesome elegance of alluringly morbid grace. Young decided to employ the violin as the most refined representation of the demons, extending it in the movement of a Hungarian-style waltz to address the gypsy element of the plot. Such classical violin performance emphasis is rarely employed with satisfying appeal in mainstream film scores, James Newton Howard's Defiance a recent success. Young managed to incorporate Joshua Bell-like violin roles into two of his 2009 scores, however, punctuating the enticingly harmonic beauty of pure evil in Drag Me to Hell and applying far more romantic variations on the instrumental technique in his restrained but pretty score for Creation that followed. The progressions handled by the violin in Drag Me to Hell are sometimes so complicated (reflecting what Young refers to as a demon's performance with ten fingers on the strings and an independently floating bow) that they required two overdubbed performances to complete. There is no question that the violins' classical stature over Young's usual deep choral tones, cymbal crashes, and pipe organ yield this score's true heart. It's a unique one at that, with only John Ottman's Apt Pupil even approaching the same territory. Another interesting aspect of this theme is the pounding of ensemble hits that announce its conclusion; whereas those in Hellraiser II resolved to key, the ones here are always a note off of the harmonic scale, producing an off-kilter feeling of unfinished business on a mass scale.

For some listeners, Young's intent of leaving a slight feeling of unresolved harmony will make the title theme for Drag Me to Hell difficult to appreciate on its own. You can definitely tell from the common conclusions to "Drag Me to Hell" and "Concerto to Hell" that the composer did not seek to cleanly conclude his tormented theme for this score on a satisfying note. A final, rising solo violin crescendo, in fact, sounds like a sick variant on the concluding bars of the end credits from Moulin Rouge. Still, an inherent sense of melodramatic lyricism with an overwhelming adult choir prevails as the general attitude of the work, featuring movements enunciated with such sway over the voices that you might think you're hearing an excruciatingly demented manipulation of Andrew Lloyd Webber's Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat. A series of two-note pairs (leading directly above and below key) introduce the title theme and are malleable as a reminder of the theme's prowess throughout the score. Fans of Young's often bold low brass usage will love its forceful pairing with bass strings to cram the key of the piece down your throat. There could be some debate about whether or not the old gypsy woman has her own dedicated theme in Drag Me to Hell; much of her material seems spawned from the same waltz-inspired constructs that sculpt the title theme. Definitely a part of the second distinct aspect of Young's material is the duo of dedicated horror stingers and unconventional use of voices for the outright frightening scenes. More than perhaps any other composer, Young is able to continuously provide this kind of music in fresh incarnations, his own recorded moaning in "Loose Teeth" almost scary to the point of comedy. A fair amount of manipulation and plain old fashioned dissonance of the most shrieking nature carries cues like "Lamia," with extraordinarily harsh brass and shrill vocals that mirror the tone of Don Davis' The Matrix Revolutions. That particular cue has two little nuggets of grandiose Young harmony mixed in between the ruckus, first in the form of a spirited waltz at about 2:20 and then in an almost tingling fantasy progression at 3:20. Those more impressed by Young's most uncomfortable techniques will appreciate the prickling string lines in "Ode to Ganush" and "Muttled Buttled Brain Stew." The stingers in the latter cue include wild octave runs by trumpets that will surely disturb anyone else in the room. The forceful rhythmic adaptation of the title theme to open "Auto-Da-Fe" has the same brutal sense of the inevitable (aided by slapped percussion and rambling pipe organ) that highlighted Frizzell's Juggernaut material from Thirteen Ghosts.

The remaining two compartmentalized sections of Drag Me to Hell produce the score's softer, melodic appeal, the usual harmonic aspects of any effectively evocative Young score. Most interesting is Young's surprisingly sweet theme for the loan officer herself. Given that she's not exactly the most sympathetic of characters, it's curious to hear such a redemptive idea for her. Perhaps this is just Young's method of contrasting the horror material to the point of yielding a red herring. Rather simplistic and repetitive, this theme is delicately conveyed via piano and other light percussion over soothing strings in "Tale of a Haunted Banker," "Familiar Familiars," and "Brick Dogs a la Carte," each performance slowing the pace of the theme and applying progressively more trepidation. Amounting to about six minutes on album, these three cues are a welcome relief from the exhausting horror material and a good match for a compilation with the themes from Young's two recent, aforementioned thrillers. The final individual section of Drag Me to Hell is the atmospheric mystery component. These sequences are highlighted by ethereal, high-range female vocalizations of the primary theme, heard first in the opening two minutes of "Mexican Devil Disaster" and extended through the majority of "Ordeal By Corpse." The dissonant side of these unnerving cues is represented in "Black Rainbows" and "Bealing Bells With Trumpet," both of which minimizing the volume but maintaining the appropriate environment though rough plucking, high-pitched whining, and the score's only clearly evident electronic manipulation. For listeners turned off by the grandiose half of Drag Me to Hell, you could probably glean ten minutes of superb light harmony of usual Young fashion for these kinds of films. But the mammoth title theme is what will truly impress any listener of the score, offering another ten minutes of rowdy Young bombast at levels not heard in decades. As an overall album, the 52 minutes of music from Drag Me to Hell is inherently extremely unpredictable, suffering the trademarks of any adept horror score. There is no doubt that this composition is a work of art, and even you typically recoil at extremely ambitious horror strikes, those offered by Young in this score merit at least your appreciation for their complexity in design and execution. Its title waltz is extremely memorable, the concluding track worthy of a challenging concert arrangement, but be prepared for Young's obvious refusal to state the theme with a sense of harmonious resolution. To say that the composer overachieved once again in a horror assignment is becoming the normal statement about such endeavors. This time, however, the overachievement is monumentally hell-raising.   @Amazon.com: CD or Download