David Axelrod - Requiem - The Holocaust (CD)

This album features passages of rather more abstruse jazz but showcases Axelrod's grasp of modern classical music. It is very dark indeed, as its subject matter would indicate, containing frequent hysterical vocal histrionics, which will not send you happy to bed and will not be sampled by a thousand rap stars and their producers. It will, if you give it your full attention, stretch and exercise your mind, containing as it does little of modern rock's repetition and musical clich. It will clean out your ears. Artistically it achieves what it sets out to do very well. If we did not know the title or subject matter the dissonance, the tortured singing and the shrill, grating violins would surely suggest a cold place filled with disturbed spirits. Grim and moving. EMI.