Tunesday: The Music of the Dark Knight Trilogy

With the release of The Dark Knight Trilogy on Blu-Ray today, I figured now would probably be my last opportunity to highlight what I consider to be one of the best original scores of the last several years.

I've been openly dismissive of Christopher Nolan's Batman series, but it's important to give credit where credit is due and Hans Zimmer and James Newton Howard's phenomenal work on Batman Begins, The Dark Knight, and The Dark Knight Rises are top notch. Zimmer and Howard went out of their way to renegotiate what a superhero score can sound like. With 2005's Batman Begins they stripped away the genre-defining "marches" that were popularized by Danny Elfman and John Williams. Instead, the two composers worked together to embody Nolan's slick underworld, sparingly holding onto some of the Gothic elements that Elfman had made synonymous with Batman back in 1989.

The following tracks are remixes that accompanied a rare 2-Disc album for The Dark Knight, a film that many consider to be the best in the series. The fact that the soundtrack could be re-purposed by the likes of Crystal Method, Mel Wesson, and Paul Van Dyk is a testament to how diverse and layered the original pieces were.

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