Sinister Symphony

A short while back, I wrote about Sinister, an effective horror film from last year starring Ethan Hawke. I briefly mentioned the score from composer Christopher Young, noting how much it added to the movie. Since then, I've picked up the soundtrack album, and I've grown even more impressed by the music.

This album is probably my favorite soundtrack album I've picked up in the last year or two... and yet, it's unlikely I'll listen to it on a regular basis. That's due to the bizarre nature of the music, which is both the most inventive thing I've heard for a film in a long time, and an unsettling and jarring cacophony that doesn't lend itself to playing in the background while you drive, work, or whatever else.

The first track of the album, "Portrait of Mr. Boogie," shows what it's all about. A melody emerges in places, and a driving rhythm even dominates a portion of it. But overall, the music is constructed from out of tune pianos, horns that groan and moan, bursts of industrial machinery, eerie backmasking, electrical arcs, voices droning ritualistically, and strangely chittering insects. And that's all just in the first track!

Some songs on the album never coalesce into any kind of discernible rhythmic structure or melody. "Levantation" is a haunted house hellscape of malfunctioning devices, harsh whispers, distorted voices, and tortured cries of pain. Other songs hew closer to conventional music, like "Never Go in Dad's Office," which almost sounds like a lost song by Peter Gabriel -- yet is still laced with the composer's odd sonic devices for the film.

The album plays with sound in every way you can imagine. Samples are played back at varying speeds, both slower and faster than normal. Different echo effects are used, with sounds seeming to resonate in every space from a musty old bathroom to a 1950s sci-fi film's concept of outer space. And through it all are noises, both hauntingly familiar and unsettlingly unidentifiable, that make your hair stand on end. Is that a human screaming, or metal grinding? Is that an animal growling, or snoring?

Near the end of the album is a sweeping 9-minute suite of music from all throughout the film. There's also an odd club remix of the music by a group called "The Rite of Left"; they add an undercurrrent of The X-Files and transform the melody into sort of a synthpop vibe. (It's the weakest track on the album, but taken purely on its own, without any connection to the movie, it's interesting in its own way.)

Christopher Young has done something really special here, and I'm all the more impressed that this is the same composer who delivered the bluesy, jazz band score of the film Rounders. The two works could not be more different. I'm definitely interested in seeking out more scores he's done over the years to see what else he's tried.

I'll give Sinister an A-, with the "minus" really only being that I can't obsessively listen to the album any time I like. It demands too much attention. But then, I probably shouldn't count that against it. Indeed, the fact that the score works so well within the context of the movie without commanding full attention probably speaks to another level on which it succeeds. So I guess call it an A.