A film is always better for having a specially written soundtrack rather than a thrown together mish mash of songs by different artists. Always better. Nobody would ever convince me that Breakfast at Tiffany’s would have been improved by being backed by a selection of late 1950’s pop instead of Henry Mancini’s masterful collage of cocktail jazz, or that the Italian Job was anything less than the ultimate caper movie for having had Quincy Jones at the musical helm.  So it’s good to see that some people still care enough to insist on an original score.

This, the third album by the Ralfe Band, provides the backdrop to writer and director Paul King’s Bunny and The Bull, a road movie set entirely within the confines of a flat.

For me, the great thing about a deliberately written film score is the way that the artist can come at the same piece of music from different directions. In this case, the same melody is presented in a wistful piano track, as French folk music and surfaces in Atlantis Rising which somehow manages to shift from a delicate baroque piano piece into a sixties Hammond organ groove into something sounding like early Madness playing at a North African bazaar.

Elsewhere, as the film visits several European countries, without ever escaping the four walls of the flat, the soundtrack follows, adding mandolins, accordions, viola and electronic instruments to the core of piano. The piano sound that the band wanted was in fact so important to them that they left it outside in the snow to make it sound ‘more degraded’. Like I said, it’s good to see that some people still care enough.

Like all good soundtracks, it sounds cinematic while also standing on its own two feet as an album in its own right, largely down to the fact that the band resisted the temptation to litter the album with dialogue from the film. A largely instrumental affair, when vocals do appear they seem to be in some way intruding, it moves along at a sedate pace before sporadically bursting into life in moments like the aforementioned Atlantis Rising, the fairground ska of Museum and the mariachi flavoured Fiesta Song.

Bunny and the Bull is available for digital download now and will be released on CD by Ghost Ship Records in the UK on February 1^st.

The Ralfe Band can be found here.