When they said repent, I wonder what they meant

I went through a heavy soundtrack phase for a while in the mid-90s. I bought tonnes of them on tape and CD, and have very big feelings about the soundtracks of that era. 

And not just all the usual suspects - everyone was listening to the Pulp Fiction and Forest Gump soundtracks, and I'm surely not the only poor bastard out walking around the deserted city after midnight listening to the Twin Peaks albums - but things like the tapes for In the Name of the Father and Mystery Train can still stir big emotions in me.

But when it comes to a ratio of how much I loved the movie, compared to the soundtrack it spawned, it was Natural Born Killers all the way. I still thought it was a terrific film, and while it may now seem shrill and overwrought, it was a splendid piss-take of media saturation and the reactions to mass murder. Mickey and Mallory are terrible, terrible people, but Oliver Stone's insistence in going so far over the top that he was in the fuckin' stratosphere is still incredibly charming.

And the Trent Reznor-produced soundtrack was an absolute revelation, far more groundbreaking and innovative than the movie it was supporting.

With songs blurring into each other, and snatches of dialogue and sounds from the film filtering through, it felt like a proper fucking concept album, more like Jeff Wayne's War of the Worlds narrative than a traditional soundtrack.

Going through the whole album felt like a goddamn journey, especially when the songs were an incredible curation, with the full throated Leonard Cohen, the immortal Shitlist, a dose of Cowboy Junkies, some deep hip-hop beats, and one of those Bob Dylan ballads that just crushes your heart.

Then you'd get Robert Downey Jr butting in with the most outrageous Australian accent in cinema, or the cop crying about his partner dying while getting his bear claw pastry, or some extended indigenous chanting building to a bloody peak.

The main characters in Natural Born Killers were, to put it bluntly, total fucking meatheads and their murderous rampage has no redeeming factors. Other than the absolutely brilliant music used to soundtrack their nihilism, of course, and it still feels like a shotgun blast to the soul.