The Nightmare Before Christmas: Original Motion Picture Soundtrack

'The Nightmare Before Christmas' lies at the top of Danny Elfman's superior film scores, because it allowed him to pour all of his creative talents into one phenomenal work. This isn't just underscore, it's the feature--this time Elfman scores a MUSICAL, with music that accentuates Tim Burton's brilliant story. The mood is deliciously dark and yet devilishly fun; it's moody and evokes fear, but like a roller coaster, you know it's all in good fun.

The vocal songs are well-orchestrated, and the lyrics range from clever fun to poetry at its most beautiful. The "Overture" builds and builds, pulling you in until you can't resist listening further. The "Opening" is handled perfectly by Patrick Stewart, with a very subtle bit of "Sally's Song" playing underneath. His reading, like a creative father reading a bedtime story to his child, is dead-on and just what's needed to lull the listener/viewer into the realm where reality fades into imagination...Read more

Danny Elfman's "The Nightmare Before Christmas" transcends a movie some people didn't like for its dark view of holidays--even if you disliked the movie, you may like the CD because the music is so devilishly clever and literate. Elfman has managed to winningly combine the joy and purity of Christmas music with a darker look at this treasured holiday. The lyrics are terrific (innocently sung but baldly truthful) and the music swoops, soars, and turns back on itself with astonishing ease and imagination. It's like an aural roller coaster in the best possible sense of that image.

Elfman sings the part of main character Jack Skellington (the "Pumpkin King," or master of Halloween) here, and he does a masterful job of conveying Skellington's yearning to do something different and important. Skellington goes after the Christmas holiday with all his energy and ends up botching it badly. Elfman manages to show us Skellington's earnestness as well as his dark...Read more

Is more fun than the movie itself. I take this in some respects as being an innate flaw in musicals, but also an innate virtue as well in other ways.
The songs on this CD each have a slightly different mood and feel to them, but each seems almost to represent a different style of music along the same basic storyline, almost like a celebration of all kinds of music used in the themes of darkling whimsy that Tim Burton is so famous for.
The music tracks containing no lyrics (there are only a handful of them, since this was the soundtrack for a musical, as I said,) are good, and set the moods when seen in the film, and are enjoyable by themselves, but like all "soundtrack music," they change mood in mid-number a lot.
The beginning and ending were not really music, but they allowed me to get a much better feel for what the story was really meant to be. Patrick Stewart is one of my favorite actors of all time, and he does a wonderful job telling those parts of...Read more