CD Reviews: Abandon and The Amityville Horror
By Stephen Armstrong
Abandon ** 1/2
CLINT MANSELL
5.1 Entertainment Group
27 tracks - 50:47
Abandon marks the directorial debut of Stephen Gaghan, who won
an Academy Award for scripting Steven Soderbergh's Traffic. Featuring
Benjamin Bratt and Katie Holmes, this big budget neo-noir centers on the
mysterious death -- and even more mysterious return -- of a co-ed's college
boyfriend.
Clint Mansell is an up-and-coming composer perhaps best known for scoring
Darren Aronofsky's Pi and Requiem for a Dream. And much like
these earlier scores, Abandon fuses chamber arrangements with dubs
and beats to create a sound that's simultaneously lush and sterile. Mansell
likes to play around with this dynamic, frequently placing more emphasis
on classical figures than electronic ones, and vice versa.
Unfortunately, whenever the composer (the former front man for Pop Will
Eat Itself, a synth-and-samples band from the U.K.) shies away from his
computerized motifs, his violin-and-piano constructions resemble, at best,
the placid mickey mouse underscoring that permeates many TV movies. But
on many of the tracks, he does well with the techno sound, dropping beats
and looping quirky tones to create a misty, otherworldly atmosphere that
augments the movie's dark and supernatural subject matter.
The opening credits theme, for instance, introduces the score's major
melody on a ghostly acoustic guitar line. A female singer materializes,
picking up and carrying the melody as she cries, "La-la-la la-la la-la-la."
Then Mansell hits the piece with a barrage of programmed beats and groaning
strings. Breathless and gorgeous, the song recalls some of Morricone's
giallo music -- The Bird with the Crystal Plumage comes to mind.
It also sounds like it's ready for the fog and lights and hallucinatory
aspects of the rave dance floor.
Recorded with a melange of high-tech devices ranging from digital boards
and compressors to samplers and boxes, the score for Abandon, like
those for Sexy Beast and Swordfish, perhaps heralds the eventual
disappearance of traditional scoring. After all, who needs to pay musicians
when individual producers like Mansell have computers that can sample and
simulate them?
Nevertheless, if Mansell represents the cream of the deejay maestros,
the revolution may take a few more years to complete. That is, as long
as music created with a computer sounds like, well, a computer, its emotional
range and dramatic functions are severely restricted. However, if and when
the sampling technology improves and the computer-composers learn to write
music as rich and varied as their old school counterparts -- be it Williams,
Goldsmith or even Horner -- then, perhaps, and only then, will the Hollywood
orchestra really be in trouble.
The Amityville Horror *** 1/2
LALO SCHIFRIN
Aleph 026
17 tracks - 61:02
In 1979, American International Pictures released The Amityville
Horror, a story in which the main character -- a haunted house -- torments
James Brolin, Margot Kidder and their three children. A box-office hit,
the movie startled audiences by turning familiar objects like walls and
doors into instruments of evil. Without a doubt, Lalo Schifrin's harsh
and expressionistic music, (nominated for an Academy Award) enhanced the
scarier aspects of the film. As Jon Burlingame explains in his liner notes
for this new disc, the soundtrack "not only frightened moviegoers but managed
to convince them that the events being depicted were real."
Recently, the 70-year-old Schifrin rerecorded his score with the Czech
National Symphony Orchestra, and released it through his own Aleph label.
Built around a two-note minor chord figure, the new treatment throbs with
the same groans, creaks and shrieks that made the original so unsettling;
with cavalcading strings, screeching electronica and moaning voices. That
is, it sets out to approximate the demonic forces that swirl through the
terrible house -- and it succeeds.
"Father Delany," for example, introduces the simple main theme with
a groaning horn. Soon violins descend and commence to dart about erratically,
like switchblades in a knife fight. In pieces like "Screams" and "The Ghost,"
the orchestra swells and contracts abruptly, creating clashing juxtapositions
of hard and soft sounds. This chaotic dynamic also characterizes the album's
most dissonant track, "The Axe," in which Schifrin grafts his morose theme
onto a wall of writhing, screaming strings. On "The Window," however, the
composer drops the pitch and slows the pace, allowing a tender mood to
emerge as the music crawls along on hushed piano. After a minute, the two-note
theme quietly and almost unnoticeably returns. And though the composition
never collapses into the entropy that dominates the other tracks, the melody's
subtle presence destroys the tranquillity the opening measures establish.
Frequently atonal and violent, Schifrin's revised treatment of his old
material succeeds because -- like Williams' Jaws -- the music manages
to arouse suspense and dread on its own. In other words, it doesn't depend
upon the film's visuals to generate anxiety. Unfortunately, this technical
success makes the disc much easier to admire than enjoy.
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