For the most part Hans Zimmer‘s 12 years A Slave score (which hasn’t been commercially released yet) is gentle, lulling, unassuming. Zimmer has called it “translucent.” But there are also a couple of tracks that have a bassy, badass, electronic-tuba-from-hell sound. Obviously conveying something evil and malevolent — the sound of slavers. There’s one (track #4 on a Slave soundtrack that I received this morning) that could be used for a scene in which Godzilla goes stomping through Tokyo. If you ask me Zimmer deserves an Oscar nomination for Best Original Score for this alone

The contemporary sound of this “horror” track was explained by Zimmer in a recent Collider interview, to wit: “Brad Pitt said [this] in Toronto…it wasn’t my quote…that it took an Englishman to make a story about a story about one of the great tragedies of America,” Zimmer told Steve “Frosty” Weintraub. “”12 Years a Slave, which is truly a period piece…..I constantly kept thinking it’s addressing our current…it’s set in the present because it’s the conversations we’ve never had, it’s the conversation we still need to have. And if it does anything it should start a conversation, and I think that’s what McQueen does brilliantly.”