��Back in stock. Here's another recent offering from the ever-impressive Death Waltz imprint, whose expanding catalog of cult horror movie soundtracks has been producing some truly revelatory releases over the past year and half; for fans of weird, sinister music and classic European horror and grindhouse delirium, this stuff is indispensable. With their reissue of Francesco De Masi's score for Lucio Fulci's sickening video nasty The New York Ripper, the label has resurrected one of the stranger scores to come from that classic era of Italian horror, an eclectic, often baffling soundtrack from a composer who was much better known for his work on spaghetti westerns and late 70's poliziottesco.

�� Fulci's notoriously mean-spirited 1982 slasher The New York Ripper (AKA Lo Squartatore Di New York) was something of a return to the giallo style of his early films, but the splatter-maestro injected his new film with an 80's-ready upgrade in the sleaze and gore department, producing what is still considered to be one of the all time sickest and sleaziest films in the director's filmography; amazingly, Ripper is still banned in the UK in uncut form, such is the depths of it's vileness. And the movie for the most part lives up to it's legendary status. This pessimistic, misanthropic video nasty has been attacked as being viciously misogynistic in the years since, and along with William Lustig's terminally grim 1980 gut-churner Maniac, helped to paint a portrait of the Big Apple as a blood-stained urban hellhole stalked by an unending parade of lowlifes and derelicts, and in Fulci's film, prowled by a bizarre psychopathic killer who taunts the inept police department in an unsettling Donald Duck-like quack. For this hellish vision of early 80s New York City, De Masi crafted a delirious m�lange of early 80's-era funk instrumentals, creepazoid ambience, bursts of red-hot samba rhythms and Latin percussion, and some passages of delectable noir jazz that drift throughout the score like steam from beneath a street grate. There are some shocking orchestral stabs that stretch the tension taut with sinister string arrangements and discordant piano chords, bursts of wickedly fuzzed-out electric guitar that snake through the shadows, sometimes slipping into a strange wash of dreamy, surfy tremolo that all evokes the seediness and danger of New York City at night, the sound utterly steeped in 42nd Street sleaze. The more sinister, jazz-flecked pieces like "Phone Call" are extremely effective, and reveal a little bit of a John Carpenter influence in the minimal, creepy piano figures that drift through the haze of flutes and bass. Some slick nocturnal saxophone slips into the mix on tracks like "New York... One Night" and the aching, moody "Fay", and darkjazz fans will swoon over the sax-and-vibraphone drenched midnight ambience of the closing track "Waiting For The Killer".

�� As always, beautifully packaged by Death Waltz, pressed on 180 gram vinyl drenched in a nauseating mixture of yellow and green hues, presented in a heavyweight case-wrapped jacket with a large four-page insert booklet with liner notes from Stephen Thrower (of Coil / Psyclobe, and the author of Nightmare USA and Eyeball) and album artist Nick Percival, and includes a large foldout poster.