This is the soundtrack to a horror film from 1971, directed by cult director Jean Rollin; Acanthus was basically a psychedelic rock group formed to record the soundtrack to this movie and then never do anything again. It’s not a particularly easy soundtrack to get ahold of, but it’s worth it. The movie is, going by the music, pretty weird. This isn’t at all a traditional horror score. It’s got elements of psychedelic rock and lounge music and even a little bit prog at times. It’s got a wheedling electric guitar tone that just cuts through all the noise around and a great sixties organ sound. I venture to say that this soundtrack contains every bit of music from the film because it tops out at around thirty-eight minutes and it includes some tracks that are less than thirty seconds, including a couple that are just basically somebody beating a floor tom a few times. But, at its best, this is great, idiosyncratic music. Sometimes, as on La Chateau, it has a nice rock groove; other times, like on Sleeping Beauty, it has a lilting acoustic vibe. It’s interestingly produced, which isn’t to say that it sounds great exactly, but it has a sixties garage type production and I really enjoyed it. The album also contains a few snippets of dialogues and some sound effects and, seemingly randomly placed throughout the album, blood curdling screams. Let me tell you, it’s real fun when those happen the first time through. After my first listen, I was kind of cool on the record on the whole and thought it was sloppy and not particularly great. But I found myself just listening to it over and over again and that sloppiness ended up becoming a big strength of the record to me. It’s a thing that sometimes really works for a soundtrack, when it kind of becomes almost like sound collage art at various points. This isn’t an album to just give somebody and say, “Hey, you’ll like this. This is good music.” But it’s a weird listening experience that got better every time I listened to it and I kind of think I love this now. 3 ½ stars.
tl;dr – bizarre psychedelic rock meets lounge music soundtrack for cult vampire film is weird, unsettling and idiosyncratic; on repeated listens, it just keeps getting better. 3 ½ stars.