The Attack The Block soundtrack. Joe Cornish managing to make the considerable sidestep from lo-fi cinephile comedian to Spielberg screenwriter is one of the great heartwarming anomalies of recent years. We can be fairly sure that when Cornish and his comedy partner Adam Buxton created a parody of Saving Private Ryan using cuddly toys (including a stuffed lion in the Matt Damon role) for their superb low-budget British comedy series The Adam & Joe Show, they weren’t treating it as a job interview. Well, turns out it was a job interview, the job’s writing a Spielberg film, and he got it. Spielberg’s The Adventures of Tintin: The Secret of the Unicorn, co-scripted by Cornish and Edgar Wright, will be hitting cinemas soon. This kind of thing does not happen everyday. When it happens to someone as talented and warm and sincere as Cornish, we must celebrate it (how you ask? His BBC 6music radio show with Buxton is available for download through the BBC’s iPlayer, and is consistently hilarious, so start there).

Attack The Block is Cornish’s debut as writer-director, and tongue-in-cheek sci-fi comedy romps don’t really get a lot better. Think Critters with a south London street gang and more jokes. Both scary and laugh-out-loud funny, it romps along from start to finish, aided by a suitably pounding and portentous score provided by British electro luminaries Basement Jaxx and composer Steven Price. Like his contemporaries and sometime collaborators Simon Pegg, Nick Frost and Edgar Wright (Frost has very funny cameo in Attack The Block, and Cornish appeared very briefly in both Hot Fuzz and Shaun Of The Dead) Cornish is a culturephile, and much of his comedy revolves around his engagement with cinema and music, so it’s no surprise that careful consideration has put into the Attack The Block soundtrack. Where other first-time directors think nothing of churning out disposable and instantly forgettable lowest-bidder mix tapes, filled out with generic tracks by untalented unknowns who need the exposure and so charge less, Cornish has pinpointed a team of musical alchemists and provided them a platform on which to strut their stuff. And strut they do.

With twenty tracks of dark and ominous big beats, the Attack The Block soundtrack conveys the same expertly balanced atmosphere of levity and eerie thrills as the film, and is more enjoyable than it has any right to be. A couple of classic songs of the Where’s Your Head At variety would have gone a long way amongst all the atmospherics, but this is a hard-working and very effective score from a fantastic modern B movie, and one that soundtrack buffs need to own. Whether or not Spielberg enjoys getting down to the sounds of the Jaxx in his spare time is yet to be confirmed, but given his apparent approval of cuddly toy parodies, anything is possible.

You can download Attack The Block soundtrack as mp3s here (UK click here)
Or get it on cd here (UK click here)

Attack The Block Soundtrack – Track List
1. The Block – Steven Price
2. Sam Is Mugged – Steven Price
3. Round Two Bruv – Steven Price
4. It’s Raining Gollums – Steven Price
5. Tooling Up – Steven Price
6. Moses Is Arrested – Steven Price
7. Tell Me I’m Dreaming – Steven Price
8. Throat Ripper – Steven Price
9. Rooftops – Steven Price
10. Moses – Ninja – Steven Price
11. Just Another Day – Steven Price
12. They Want Moses – Steven Price
13. Actions Have Consequences – Steven Price
14. Eat My Hat – Steven Price
15. They Fell Out Of The Sky – Steven Price
16. I Need To Finish What I Started – Steven Price
17. Turn The Gas Up – Steven Price
18. Moses Vs. The Monsters – Steven Price
19. Moses The Hero – Steven Price
20. The Ends – Basement Jaxx

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