Live Review: Morricone Youth: 'Mad Max' Live Score

George Miller conceived of Mad Max as a "silent film with sound". 

It's an absurd, fetishistic slice of brutality that portrays the adventures of Max Rockatansky and his fellow tarmac Tarzans, playing cat and mouse with the psychotic Toecutter and his band of marauding bikers. It's a carnival of leather and chrome, petrol and sweat, and more than a little eyeliner.

New York's Morricone Youth rescore cult films, swapping out orchestras for prog rock and a surreal black-tar freak-out like Mad Max was ripe pickings for the group.

Feral surf-rock jams represented Toecutter and his mob, while a surging kosmische arrangement followed the high-speed action of both good guys and bad. Some of it was out of place and a little tone-deaf. The interactions between Max and his wife and child are good examples. The music didn't shift down, forcing frantic energy into scenes that deserved a more serene approach, with the result being that tender moments were washed fairly clean of pathos and character building.

Other moments worked like gangbusters, like the opening scene of The Nightrider meeting his fiery doom at the hands of Max and his Interceptor. The snarling guitars were like hungry dogs snapping at the heels of the two racing opponents, reaching a decent crescendo as Nightrider's V8 ploughs into a broken-down tanker.

The film felt and sounded like vaudeville on acid, with gurgling organs and trippy synth passages narrating the sun-bleached apocalypse on the screen. The music added a surreal geniality to what is a dystopic picture in which the good guys get turned into dog meat or turn into half-crazed vigilantes.

The Morricone Youth have discovered an excellent formula and their two-night run for this year's festival was a charming diversion from the usual festival material.