Music from 'Dragon Tattoo' as dark as the film

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Grade: B

CD • Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross won the Oscar earlier this year for scoring David Fincher's film "The Social Network," so fittingly Fincher asked the pair to score his next film — the dark adaptation of the Swedish novel The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo.

The soundtrack — released as a three-CD set that is longer than the film — is as unsettling as the haircut of the film's anti-heroine Lisbeth Salander. Like the film, which takes place during a cold Swedish winter with a seedy, disturbing family dynamic festering under the surface, the soundtrack is cold and dissonant, with processing and layering which Reznor was known for while in Nine Inch Nails. In fact, much of the music is reminiscent of "Hurt," the Nine Inch Nails song that featured a hauntingly beautiful piano melody wrapped in unnerving distortion.

Included on the soundtrack is the scorched-earth rendition of Led Zeppelin's "Immigrant Song," by Yeah Yeah Yeah frontwoman Karen O, that memorably sets the mood, albiet bad, in the film's trailer. While this soundtrack on its own is often arduous to listen to, its presence in the film is essential to giving you the creeps.