Thom Yorke – Suspiria (Music for the Luca Guadagnino film)
(XL Recordings/Rhythmethod)
Reviewed by Tim Gruar.
The best soundtracks boast iconic recurring themes that boldly define the atmosphere of a movie. All it takes are a few bars and you know exactly what’s going to happen. Take the opening bars of Jaws, of Pyscho, for instance. The downside is that for evermore some orchestra will be playing cheesy variations as part of their summer pops series. Both tunes were never intended that way.
Still, that won’t be a problem for Thom Yorke. Not that there aren’t some vivid moments on his new album. It’s just I can’t see those musical directors really going for much on this creepy and slightly disturbing collection. I should explain. For director Luca Guadagnino’s remake of Dario Argento’s 1977 horror classic Suspiria, Yorke has given us his own creature. In the film, Dakota Johnson plays an American dance student who is drawn into the nightmarish secret universe of a European dance school (presided over by none other than the wonderful White Witch, herself, Tilda Swinton).
There is one line from the film that sets up its disturbing, haunting tone: “When you dance the dance of another, you make yourself in the image of its creator”. There is a thinly veiled warning that with the help of black magic one can assume the identity of another. In this case, the top dog in the dance world. But at what price?
Yorke’s output may well be a response to that. Suspiria is a double album of snippets, scenes and scenarios intermingled with some of Yorke’s less than conventional song material. All are designed to meet a brief that requires a climate of dread, fear and claustrophobia.
Naturally, some of the music is really only designed to move a scene along whilst others go deeper, as constructs from the film itself employing audio from the film (such as snatches of conversations and wet footsteps), blended with a range of eerie soundscapes and melodies to provide abstract commentaries on our current social and political environment. Without seeing the film, it would be hard to judge how this all works on screen but it certainly looks like the monster we all are expecting, judging by the trailer.
The opening of this album has shards of harsh electronic daylight (A Storm That Took Everything). This is followed by The Hooks, with its delicate layer of piano notes that gently drop across a melody over a bed of synths like rain on an imagined roofing. Yorke has followed the classic horror themes of security (with soft, comforting chords) and threat brought by the harsher, more jarring notes and building percussions. Usually, this is done with oboes, cellos and timpani. Yorke uses digital ambience instead, so the result is even more intense and unsettling. He drops in the obligatory redemption on Sabbath Incantation, with a monastic choir he’s created from loops and vocal overdubs.
There are plenty of short scene samples that don’t really seem to go anywhere. Some are less than a minute. These are best appreciated on screen, I think. Most are disturbing in one way or another. They are labelled as scenes – like Belongings Thrown In A River, although that is not really clear from this modern avant-garde soundscape. A Light Green is even more ambiguous, possibly the result of a coloured beam broken down to code and translated to music notation.
There are one or two more accessible ‘songs’ on this album, such as the dreamlike number Has Ended. On this Yorke’s son, Noah, plays a thin, fractured beat over an eerie droning and Yorke’s own fragile vocals. This is possibly the most like a Radiohead song you’ll get on this album, especially in the lyrics: “the ego it had ended, the loud mouth was gone.” No guesses who the “dancing puppet king” is likely to be. I’m looking at you, Mr Trump!
One of the singles, Suspirium, could well be Yorke’s best work of later years. Written and recorded simply on an upright piano, the same kind that dance teachers use with their pupils, this one seems to drift in, as a memory or some desolate, moody snapshot: “All is well, as long as we keep spinning,” he sings, alluding to the innocent, unsuspecting ballet dancers in the film but at the same time he’s questioning that familiar feeling of entrapment in the ordinary. In the film, it’s the lead who aspires to greatness but as the sepia melts away, Yorke’s ethereal singing brings more sinister feelings which he wraps in a simple flute and baroque chords.
Another vocal track called The Universe Is Indifferent uses a string section and a patchy, angsty acoustic guitar as the landscape for snatches of a macabre event, presented like a babbling victim staggering from the scene: “I walk in the willows…to walk in sorrow and shame, a knife is buried”.
The last two tracks are total horror. Voiceless Terror and Epilogue build in glorious tension and then fall back with a frightening beauty. The strange, piercing distorted strings seem to fly down a spiralling dark tunnel towards you like an unidentified spectre, teeth ready to snarl and snap like a rabid dog.
Yorke’s soundtrack is disturbing, predatory and lurking. If the film is anything like the soundtrack, it will be a difficult and uncomfortable watch, indeed.
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