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For me there are two different types of film score that work well. The first are thos with songs by established artists that punctuate a film, illustrating the scenes and rooting them perfectly in time. The Commitments and Trainspotting are good examples of this approach. The other are scores specifically written for films which can never be separated from the imagery that they seek to highlight.
From the latter category, there are two soundtracks that stand out. I rushed straight out and bought them both after seeing the films and whenever I listen to them I get an immediate sense of the story. The first is Michael Nyman’s haunting soundtrack to The Piano. The second is Gabriel Yared’s score for Betty Blue/37° Le Matin.
Jane Campion’s The Piano is the story of a mute Scottish woman who travels with her daughter and her beloved piano to a remote spot on the coast of 19th century New Zealand for an arranged marriage, and who begins a stormy involvement with her illiterate neighbour. Nyman’s almost naive music works on an emotional level, and transports you immediately to the windswept beach when you hear it. The score veers between the Caledonian character of the main protagonist and the contrasting barrenness of the new world she finds herself in. It has an almost Wicker Man feel to it. The orchestral immediacy – yet jarring forcefulness – suggest the frustrations of her mute world.
Jacques Beineix’s passionate love story, Betty Blue, tells the tale of handyman and failed novelist Zorg, who has his life turned upside down by Betty, a free spirit whose passion for life veers towards the pathological. Its brief ode to love, ‘Betty et Zorg’, is an eerie piano theme punctuated with one discordant key that leaves you with a lump in your throat as it is repeated throughout the film to
highlight the girl’s descent into madness. It becomes a motif for the differing moods in the film. The bluesy version creates a sense of loneliness and isolation, yet when it is played as a brass solo it evokes pure joy and love.
The Nyman piece is more fluid, Yared’s fragmented, but they are similar in as far as it is the title track that dominates and guides each soundtrack. There are no conceptual or intellectual ideas here. Both are memorable because they are emotional roller-coaster rides, romantic, haunting and almost primeval. They strike a chord with anyone who has been in love or lust and both manage to illustrate beautifully the mind of a troubled soul by means of beat and string.
There aren’t nearly as many good soundtracks as there should be. Quentin Tarantino seems content to peddle fairly obvious compilations of other people’s compilations, and no-one in their right mind should want to exchange hard earned cash for syrupy orchestral sentimentality interspersed with random Meg Ryan or Tom Hanks quips. The best soundtracks for me are the ones written especially for the movie, and those that engage the listener regardless of whether they’ve seen the film or not.
Miles Davis’ Ascenseur Pour L’Echafaud does this beautifully – it’s a wonderful album even without Louis Malle’s brilliant 50’s black and white thriller playing alongside. Whereas cynical toss like The Wedding Singer seemed like 80s songs were awkwardly crowbarred into the soundtrack specifically to sell CDs in the foyer after the film, Miles’ band improvised in the studio while the film itself was projected onto the wall. It’s a masterpiece of audio-visual complementarity. Having said all that, it’s not my favourite soundtrack.
The best by a mile, and you’ll have a hard time trying to convince me otherwise, is David Lynch and Alan R. Splet’s Eraserhead. It’s terrifying, bleak, alien, hilarious, excruciating, bewildering and gloriously weird. Whereas soundtrack album dialogue is normally a mood breaker, snatches of out-of-context vocal sandwiched between two already well-known soul tracks, here it becomes another layer of sinister wrongness. Without the film, it’s one of my favourite albums. With the film, it becomes an integral part of one of my favourite films.
Finally, I can’t write a piece on soundtracks without briefly mentioning Italian cinema. I recently got hold of all 10 volumes of Easy Tempo, the compilations of Italian soundtrack material from the 60s and 70s, and it’s a long time since I’ve smiled so hard while listening to music. I haven’t seen any of the associated movies, but I’m going to make it my life’s mission to do so. When I am king, every home will have these. James Horner will be tried for crimes against humanity; Piero Piccioni and Piero Umiliani will be canonised. Things will be better.
In 2004 my partner of three years had to move back home to Australia. The night before I had to move her belongings and her in my shitty car to the airport, we sat and drank wine in our front room and listened to music. One of the things we listened to was Angelo Badalamenti’s score for David Lynch’s The Straight Story. The film itself is a masterpiece of agonising sentimentality and the soundtrack is no different. I fully expect Lynch and Badalamenti to have researched the most heartbreaking chords and notes available and then made sure they utilised them to their full effect. It is something else, it really is. It’s almost cruel.
I remember we fell asleep on the sofa listening to ‘Lauren’s Walking’ and woke up when it was light. We spent our last night together on a sofa. A fucking sofa. What idiots. Since that point I haven’t heard the soundtrack or seen the film again. I have gone out of my way to experience neither and I am absolutely sure I will never see the film or hear the soundtrack again. It is that good.
Paris, Texas is one of my favourite ever films, and it must be said that Ry Cooder’s soundtrack album is also one of my favourite ever records. And that’s just in its own right. The album barely more than half an hour long, and the majority of it is solely Cooder’s wonderful, slide-driven acoustic guitar with some barely audible sympathetic percussion. As a piece of Wender’s film, it’s a beautiful, transformative catalyst that charges the rolling landscape and directionless characters with ravaging, stark emotion and depth. The simple, lilting theme performed by Cooder at the start of the film, as arid cliffs and rock formations surround the mute man in a red cap called Travis, is one of the finest moments of cinema-making I have ever experienced.
There’s not just Cooder’s guitar on the album though. Harry Dean Stanton, who stars as Travis, pops up to sing a traditional song in Spanish, startling you out of any stoned reverie you might have drifted into. Stanton sings beautifully, by the way. And scattered amongst the delicate filigrees of guitar exploration, the penultimate track “I Knew These People” is the record’s most curious moment; an eight minute monologue by Stanton, with subtle, sympathetic guitar by Cooder creeping in to colour in textures and emotions. It provides the film’s beautiful denouement, and as such, is something to treasure on record… and also a horrendous spoiler if you haven’t seen the film first. Finally, the album ends with a cover of Blind Willie Johnson’s “Dark Was The Night”, revealing the source of Cooder’s inspiration for such weary, broken-down but elegaic blues as these. It’s absolutely stunning.
Soundtrack albums, for the most part, exist just one step above the novelty record. Bought on a whim, spurred on by little more than the warm association with a flick you may have enjoyed, they often don’t survive more than one spin before being reconciled to the dustier regions of the record collection, itself only an intermediate step towards the charity shop. It’s surprising, therefore, that one of my favourite albums to be released in 2003 (and my most-played record throughout 2004) was the soundtrack to Sophia Coppola’s movie Lost In Translation.
Say what you like about the film. I’m a sappy bastard for whom Bill Murray is a cinematic icon thanks to an early trip to the flicks to see Ghostbusters. This, in addition to the standard geek’s fascination with Japan (not to mention husky-voiced girls in pink pants), makes it one of my favourites, but I’m not blind to its faults and wouldn’t try to defend it against a concerted critical attack on most fronts. Except that of Coppola’s choice of accompanying tunage, of course. Lost In Translation works as a soundtrack because its woozy, gently melancholy sounds echo the jet-lagged ennui of its characters. Lost In Translation works as an album because that thematic link keeps it from feeling like a random collection of tunes. That, and it contains Kevin Shield’s most substantial body of published work in years, while Squarepusher rubs shoulders with the Jesus And Mary Chain like a hipster’s wet dream.
The most famous Hitchcock / Herrmann collaboration may be Psycho, but The Birds is much more interesting. No nervy violin stabs, no music at all. The Birds is all about silence.
When the birds gather, they cackle and chatter. They sound like birds but somehow wrong, unnatural and that’s because you aren’t listening to birds, but to tape spooling.
When the birds attack, the tape spooling becomes an enveloping, wheeling riot.
But at the most chilling points in the film, there is silence. And all you can do is listen for the birds to return.
Here’s an interesting conjunction between music and art, that I’ve just been told about. Looks like a good thing to me…
“Here at Tate Modern we’ve just launched an initiative called Your Tate Track. The initiative is aimed at unsigned bands and musicians aged between 16 – 24.
Your Tate Track asks unsigned musicians to choose a work of art from a selection on display at Tate Modern and then to write a track in response to it. The public will vote on submitted tracks and the 20 most popular will go before a judging panel which will include, among others, Graham Coxon, Roll Deep, Basement Jaxx and Radio 1 DJ Huw Stephens.
The winning track will be installed in the gallery through headphones next to the work which inspired it and will be streamed on Tate’s website. Tracks can be submitted until the 31 August.”
Over the next few weeks, I’ll be regularly posting some short pieces here about people’s favourite movie soundtracks, and why they mean something to the writer in question.
The first will be online soon, but I’d love it if you got in touch to tell me your favourite soundtrack, and why, so you can get involved. Send your suggestions to me at simonminter@diskant.net.
Looking forward to hearing from you!
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Their website currently states “Thank you and goodbye!”, but I can’t ascertain whether or not Oblio Joes are still an ongoing concern. So, Let’s Decompose And Enjoy Assembling could be their last release. If that’s the case, it’s a shame. This is a fantastic collection of off-centre songs that as much recall the giddy optimism of prime Beach Boys and the glossy vacuity of 10CC as they do the noise-tinged melodies of Pavement and Built To Spill.
Whilst the Pavement comparisons are at times obvious – in the broken, wavering vocals of John Brownell and the rich, subtly complex song structures – it’s not like Pavement have sole rights to creating uplifting, sadness-inflected melodic guitar music. Oblio Joes stamp their own personality on many of the songs here; the heart-rending, self-effacing lyrics on the unnamed opening track and closer ‘Grey Skies’, ‘Dutch Boy’ with its growth from simplistic banjo picking into dreamy, staccato swathes of tune, or the upbeat and jolly ‘Good Neighbour’, with its rolling enthusiasm and melody after melody.
At the heart of their music, Oblio Joes employ a skilful sense of arrangement and contrast. Songs like ‘Capricorn Cowboy’ and ‘Holes’ sound initially simple, but underneath their surface lies a strange collection of sounds and multi-layered instrumentation. It’s this seemingly effortless mastery of songs that can be peeled back to reveal rich seams of musicianship and emotional tugging that sets Oblio Joes apart, as not only a great pop band, but one with real depth and the ability to reward the careful listener. If it is thank you and goodbye from them, this album is a fine way to bow out.
Throughout the 1980s, a lot of compilations were released that reflected the then-burgeoning interest in recreating the garage punk and psychedelic sounds of the late 1960s. Whilst this second volume in Northern Star’s Psychedelica series isn’t along exactly the same lines as those earlier releases – these new collections compile modern psychedelia, rather than bands directly influenced by the music of many Pebbles, Nuggets or Rubble-type bands – a similar spirit is at work here. There is still no end of bands out there that are creating music that reflects the blissed-out, amped-up, lysergically-altered stylings of the original garage punk artists, albeit reflected through the ouptut of a variety of later bands and movements.
So, this was never going to be a compilation that didn’t have a lot of musical reference points. Through its 35 tracks, the music here broadly falls into a number of styles that suggests some particular music of times gone by. The early-80s Paisley Underground sound of bands like Long Ryders or The Chesterfield Kings is represented here in the clean, melodic, straightforward music of Belles Will Ring and Floorian. Big Star’s brand of power pop, as prefigured by Buffalo Springfield and reimagined by Teenage Fanclub, is respectfully used here by The Quarter After, Goldrush and Riff Random. The unfairly-maligned shoegazing sound of Ride or Slowdive is an influence here on Heroes Of Switzerland, The Daysleepers and Sunsplit; and the heavier, darker, more repetitive style of Loop and Spacemen 3 is displayed here by The Black Angels, Mainline, The People’s Revolutionary Choir, The Voices, Hopewell and The Yours. There are also slices of music on these two CDs that contain varying shades of gothic, Cramps-style garage (The Dolly Rocker Movement), John Lennon-influenced plaintive balladry (The Hiss) and straight-ahead retro garage punk (Dust).
This continues from Psychedelica‘s first volume very well, in its aim to showcase artists working in a particular mindset. Like most compilations, it’s not without its slow points or likely-to-be-skipped tracks; but as a whole it’s an even set of tracks that certainly bears repeated listening. The standout songs are those that not only remind of music gone by, but move in more unique directions: Flowers Of Hell, with their mournful piano, violin and theremin mantra; Perfect Blue, with some subtle electronica; Say Jansfield, with a folk song that warps off into strange, progressive areas.
Independent music goes through trends and phases all of the time, but Psychedelica suggests that there are always bands that continue to trace a line from the late 1960s to the 21st century. Hopefully, more volumes will follow.
