Daft Punk: Tron

Occasionally artist soundtracks work as stand-alone albums: Air's score to The Virgin Suicides is second only to their debut in terms of quality, while Amon Tobin has never bettered his tense, percussive score to the video game Splinter Cell.

Tron: Legacy, however, barely sounds like Daft Punk: in fact, the ticking percussion and grinding chudda-chudda-chudda strings sound more like an attempt to copy Hans Zimmer and James Newtown Howard's score for The Dark Knight than anything you'd expect from the people behind ‘Around The World' (Zimmer, interestingly, gets a thank you on the disc. Maybe it was for not complaining). ‘Disc Wars' in particular sounds like it should be playing behind a helicopter pan around Batman standing atop a high building, gazing over the cityscape. ‘Derazzled' brings the pace up, but at less than two minutes it makes a poor case for being a single, and most of the other cuts are atmospheric without being particularly memorable.

Presumably it works better with the visuals, because as an album Tron: Legacy doesn't really have much to recommend it beyond background music.

Time Out Tokyo rating:

Tron: Legacy is out now on Walt Disney Records