The Good,The Bad & The Ugly – SOUNDTRACK****

The Good The Bad & The Ugly Main Title/The Sundown/The Strong/The Desert/The Carriage Of The Spirits/ Marcia/The Story Of A Soldier/Marcia Without Hope/The Death Of A Soldier/The Ecstasy Of Gold/The Trio-Main Title

The iconic spaghetti western The Good, The Bad & The Ugly starred Clint Eastwood and showcased the imaginative and evocative soundtrack composed by Ennio Morricone. (US:4)

"By any stretch of the imagination, the score that Morricone composed and conducted for The Good The Bad & The Ugly is one of the most imaginative and intense scores composed for any movie, western or otherwise. Its familiar theme is so unmistakable and so pulse pounding. What seems to have escaped quite a few people is how a lot of this music happens to be in minor keys, emphasizing the broiling landscape of this movie's Civil War setting."

"With this score, Morricone pushed to its limits his rough, weird style of Western music that he developed in his two previous Westerns. The famous Main Title sums up Morricone's approach perfectly: bizarre instruments, jagged changes in sound, and a thunderous tempo. This main theme appears throughout the score in many variations, depending on which member of the unholy trinity it is describing."

"From the moment I finished watching The Good The Bad & The Ugly, I knew I needed the soundtrack. It's one of the best things about that awesome movie, which happens to be one of my favourites. It's what makes the movie more cool, and even more fun to watch. The soundtrack includes songs from some of the coolest parts of the movie, and the best part has to be the main title."

"The brilliant complexity of the main title theme, with its counterpoint and mixture of traditional and electric instrumentation, is nowhere else to be found on the album until deep into side two where we get The Ecstasy Of Gold and The Trio - Main Title. A masterpiece of an album this is not. Just because the movie is great - and so is its composer - doesn't mean that its soundtrack album representative has to be."

"Italian composer Ennio Morricone's finest moment, and by far the best soundtrack of all time in my opinion. This is just dusty, gritty, death refined into music. It is legendary, revolutionary and epic."