Doom (Original Motion Picture Soundtrack)

Album Review

Doom revolutionized the first-person-shooter gaming concept. But Doom also meshed sci-fi, horror, and explosive firepower, meaning it only needed to add snakes and bikinis to fascinate whatever percentage of the male population it didn't already control. (Doom: The Leisure Suit Larry Edition....) It was only a matter of time until the franchise followed Resident Evil into the movie marketplace, and who better to star as the game's lone Marine than wrestler-turned-surprisingly-spry action star the Rock? The business plan is brutally, ingeniously simple. Hideous Demons + The Rock + The Rock laying badass People's Elbow/chain gun smackdowns on Hideous Demons = teenage boy $$$. Musical accompaniment isn't primary in that equation; it only needs to provide an adequately loud throb. Clint Mansell's score for the film does that, drawing on his background in clanging industrial-pop (he was the brains behind Pop Will Eat Itself) for tracks like "Destroyed" that detonate into proto-Ministry blasts of drum programming and ragged guitars. However, most of Doom isn't loud but gloomy, emulating the game's stalking-down-dank-hallways tension with swirling soundscapes and faraway thuds. "Searching..." is capable at this, as is "Infirmary" and "Resurrection." Mansell's tracks might not be very memorable, but they work as backgrounds. He could have included some death or black metal instead of a throwaway remix of Nine Inch Nails' "You Know What You Are?" Slough of Despair, Hunted, Sever the Wicked, Neurosphere — Doom's levels sound like black metal bands, anyway. Still, when coupled with disintegrating demon faces or the Rock's right eyebrow on fully automatic, this soundtrack delivers the goods.