In Brief

This soundtrack to the critically acclaimed Jim Jarmusch film was produced entirely by the Wu-Tang Clan’s the RZA, and nearly every track features at least one member of the Staten Island rap group’s mammoth rhyme family. The surprise is that the interludes, which feature the film’s star Forest Whitaker reading passages of samurai text over moody tracks, are among the album’s better selections. Tekitha’s hopeful “Walking Through the Darkness” and the Wu-Tang Clan’s intense “Fast Shadow” bleed emotion and relate to the movie--a rarity for hip-hop heavy soundtracks, which are usually a hodgepodge of random songs by popular artists that have no connection to the film. The addition of a few songs crucial to the movie but absent from the soundtrack would have enhanced an already powerful package.

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