[Facebook] Iain Ballamy – MirrorMask

This was always going to be a hard one to write – MirrorMask as a film is difficult to describe, and the music is so bizarre and ecelctic that it has a very niche appeal, so what follows is, as ever, completely subjective. The album starts as it means to go on, with the Flyover and Circus Overture, along with the next two tracks, playing as bizarre jazz circus music, immediately followed and contrasted by the more mundane, gloomy muzak of Running For The Bus. It’s good muzak, though, as composer and sax player Iain Ballamy proves he can make even the most banal style into eminently listenable incidental music. Next is one of the standout tracks of the album, Abandoned Hall, whcih mixes classical incidental music with jazz overtones and keyboards, before entering into a fantastically odd slap-pop bass and sax-driven section. The album continues with less notable incidental music, as with all soundtracks composed for films, though Arresting Helena is possibly the best musical depiction ever of being chased down the street by a samba band, the luscious choral interlude of The White Queen Sleeps provides a totally different yet totally appropriate followup to it, and Rabbit Band has all the energy of any other song, compressed into forty seconds of frenetic jazz. The next track that exceeds the two-minute mark is also the next one really worth mentioning, as Giants Orbiting echoes French film noir soundtracks, but with the usual jazz stylings and fantastical overtones, before suddenly giving way to genuinely creepy, almost Kraftwerk-like electronic chase music. Mrs. Bagwell’s Rhumba is just incredibly odd, as an unexpected break into generic rhumba music with eerie operatic ranting over the top, followed by Meeting The Sphinx And The Dark Queen, one of the album’s weaker tracks, as the minimalistic approach of much of the darker incidental music is overdone, creating a very flat audio landscape. Monkeybirds brings the quality back up, with a circus march giving way to an almost techno chase theme, but is then again followed by several unremarkable incidental pieces. Betrayed! is notable for reusing the minimalist aesthetic of Meeting…, but pulling it off spectacularly, creating an unsettling atmosphere using slow, creeping strings and eerie vocals. Following this is one of the most individual, and certainly the most unsettling, track on the album: a cover of the Carpenters’ Close To You, sung in an eerily bland voice, overlaid with the dound of clockwork gradually running down. It’s better than it sounds, and a major reason to see the film. The album then proceeds to its closing stages, with A New Life and A Rather Tense Dinner Party reprising the real-world and dreamworld themes respectively, and both subtly changing and slowly breaking down, leading into the final track of the soundtrack proper, the ten-minute Discoveries/Fight or Flight?/Goodbye Evil Helena suite. This is a dramatic neo-classical piece that manages to be very noticeably film soundtrack music, but still good to listen to in its own right, with an orchestral score mixed with the ever-present jazz influences, and some very well-handled synth. The album then finishes on two tracks that are effectively bonus tracks, with My Waltz For Newk, an extended reprise of the Fish Street waltz theme, which brings us down from the drama of the end of the Discoveries suite and returns to the circus music of the start of the album. The album ends on If I Apologised, notable for being the only conventional song as such on the album – a melancholy, breathy shoegazer of a track, but surprisingly good, with clean vocals over a single guitar and drums creating a much more stripped-down feel than the orchestrated music of the rest of the album.

Wow, that was a long one. If anyone has any comments or suggestions about these reviews (too long, too short, too pretentious, too reliant on progressing through an album chronologically, get the hell off my news feed, etc.), please get them to me, and I’ll do my best to please everyone. Maybe. Also, poll of the day – should this list really include soundtracks/best ofs, and why (not)?

Next album’s Feeder’s Echo Park (http://tinyurl.com/ycnlcjs) – meant to be a good album, but can’t say as I’ve really ever listened to it. Next question – have I hit the character limit yet? Apparently not.