Australian buddies Nick Cave and Warren Ellis spent a lot of time on the prairie in 2005 and 2007, laying down music for (and even appearing in) the Westerns Proposition and the Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford. While the former relied heavily on Cave's doom-laden vocals, Assassination focuses on fellow Bad Seed Grinderman and founding member of the Dirty Three Warren Ellis' violin and Celeste-tinged audio landscapes to color the "new" Old West. Like a music box tipped on its side in the desert, Cave and Ellis' all instrumental soundtrack occasionally echoes familiar genre exercises (check out the Morricone-esque "Song for Jesse"), but it's long, languid motifs are as spread out as the film's 160-minute run time. If anything, Assassination is comparable to Angelo Badalamenti's lonely score for David Lynch's Straight Story, or the Horseflies' work on the films of Jay Craven (Where the Rivers Flow North and A Stranger in the Kingdom), and like those recordings, the power it yields lies squarely in the understanding of the often overwhelming weight of solitude.