Brazen instrumental originality and a brutally harsh tone are the main characteristics of the music for Logan, a small orchestral ensemble taking a back seat to guitar, piano, harmonica & glass harmonica, drum kits, and the usual manipulation expected for any film with roadside dystopia and perpetual death. The score's personality is depressing and oppressive at every moment, even when involving the young girl, a mutant clone of the titular character, who must be shuttled to safety on the journey that occupies the whole story. It's the end of the road for both Logan and Professor Charles Xavier, and there's hope for a new generation of mutants in the final scenes. But the score totally misses that point. So concerned with its growling accompaniment of the travel and fight scenes, the music forgets the lineage and survival connotations, Beltrami's motific devices frustratingly slow, sparse, and lacking any spark of life. Important death scenes are assigned meaningless noise as music, and the girl is sent to her future with a slight Western-noir sense that makes little sense. Beltrami emphasizes subtlety above all else, except when action necessitates vague coolness or grinding dissonance. The final four tracks on the soundtrack album release nicely summarize the motifs for the girl, Logan's future despair, his physical problems, and the journey in general. If you really stretch, you can imagine that some of the two-note pairs that Beltrami assigns to Logan's traveling motif are connected with his score for The Wolverine, but the connection is poor at best. You do have motifs of sorts for the villains, whether it's powerful, electronically slurred base tones in "The Grim Reavers" or total mechanical pounding for an evil clone in "X-24." The former is at least tolerable and marginally frightening. The other motifs are either obnoxious to the point of laughter or obtusely ineffectual due to pacing and subversion. Exercising some of this nightmarish musical environment is fine so long as it is used as counterpoint to the alternative, namely Logan's past. Without that disparity in battle within this film, there can be no proper emotional catharsis, and it makes for an extremely dull and mind-numbing album that conveys no narrative for the otherwise important closing chapter for two vital franchise characters. On the other hand, as critics noted about the film in general, kudos need to be supplied for taking a chance, and Beltrami responded to this unusual demand as best as anyone could have. While this music is less cohesive and tolerable than The Wolverine, it's at least more technically intelligent, and they thus receive the same rating. On album, though, be prepared for adamantium poisoning of your ears.  **   @Amazon.com: CD or Download