Crank: High Voltage (Original Motion Picture Soundtrack)

The continuing adventure of Jason Statham’s scowling hitman Chev Chelios is another hyper-manic, cross-cultural fusion, not so much a shotgun wedding of Hong Kong action film flair and relentless Silicon Valley video game violence as it is a honeymoon in Hades. This surging, playfully inventive score by former Mr. Bungle/Faith No More mainstay Mike Patton not only paces the action, but occasionally deftly underplays it to good effect with dank, moody textures and a world-beat sensibility that occasionally verges on the satirical. Sparking with metallic edges, club beats, recycled funk rhythms and a grab-bag of nervous percussive-electronic samples, Patton’s score veers across genres with the reckless abandon of the film’s ticking time bomb of a protagonist. Less adventurous instincts might have yielded the typical contemporary electronica pastiche, but the fledgling composer (this is but his second full feature score) mostly avoids those clichés with a sometimes loopy sense of musical humor worthy of Les Claypool.