Amazon.co.uk Review
Although generally happy to hide their more highbrow concerns beneath a postmodernist pop sheen, on
Battleship Potemkin, Neil Tennant and Chris Lowe let their artistic ambitions run free. Inspired by Soviet director Sergei Eisensteins desire that his revolutionary 1904 classic of the same name be furnished with a new score every decade to keep it fresh, here Tennant and Lowe have teamed up with the Dresden Sinfoniker orchestra in order to remake the original score with a contemporary flavour.
One clue to the sound is through the presence of composer Torsten Rasch, who has formerly reworked the music of German industrial provocateurs Rammstein: the likes of "Nyet" and "Night Falls" share something of that bands deadpan hybrid of Wagnerian doom and pulsing electronics. More familiar to Pet Shop Boys fans will be three vocal originals--"Our Daily Bread", "No Time For Tears" and "After All (The Odessa Staircase)"--that boast lyrics inspired by the original subtitles (although the latter also contains pointed allusions to the Iraq war).
Reviews have been mixed, some critics accusing Tennant and Lowe of overpowering the film with a showy, inappropriate score. As a stand-along piece, however, its a modest success--thematically adventurous, and clever without allowing itself to get bogged down in an ironic morass.--Louis Pattison
Product Description
A few years after their foray into musicals, the Pet Shop Boys, who are quite possibly disco-pop's most intellectual act, have returned with another project: a live score to Sergei Eisenstein's
Battleship Potemkin. Battleship Potemkin was a silent film made in Leninist Russia in 1925, and tells the (somewhat idealized) story of a revolt among sailors of the Czar's Black Sea fleet. Given the Pet Shop Boys' history of playing with Leninist imagery (take, for example, the lyrics to "West End Girls"), they were a suitably apt choice to do a live score to this film.