Music Reviews

Pennsylvanian indie star Alex G has created an original score for Jane Schoebrun’s Sundance hit We’re All Going to the World’s Fair. The film – about a teenager who immerses herself in the world of roleplay online and gains the attention of an older man – is an extremely eerie modern horror, and Alex G’s mournful suburban score is the perfect accompaniment. It had me thinking about other instances where accomplished musicians have lent their skills to produce wonderful original film scores.

Genius minimalist composer Philip Glass penned a beautiful score for Paul Schrader’s incredible biopic Mishima: A Life in Four Chapters (1985) – full of wind chimes, ominous orchestral sweeps and languorous guitar. It was one of his earliest film scores, with the composer going on to work on film hits such as The Truman Show (1998) and The Hours (2002).

Dario Argento’s lurid, brilliant Suspiria (1977) was provided with a fittingly excessive score thanks to the Italian prog-rock band Goblin, who worked with the director on many of his Giallo horrors. The Suspiria score is a unique standout, however, where synths and screams combine to create an unnerving and sometimes ridiculous soundtrack.

More recently, electronic music producer Daniel Lopatin, better known under his stage moniker Oneohtrix Point Never, created the perfect, anxiety-inducing score – filled with queasy, celestial synths – for The Safdie brothers’ feverish thriller Uncut Gems (2019) about a gambling jeweller. IT

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The most formidable aspect of King Gizzard’s mercurial run of 20 full-length albums is the ability to maintain cohesion while space-hopping between genres, styles and heady concepts. It’s earned the band a fan base akin to Deadheads or Phish-heads for the internet age. Omnium Gatherum, their latest, sees them embracing their jam band inclinations – for better and worse. Gizz’s albums range from focused genre excursions, lore-building fantasy, breezy psych-pop, and odds and sods collections. This outing is a case of all of the above, with the bonus of break-beat rap on ‘The Grim Reaper’. Gear changes begin to clunk when there’s space-pop, riff metal and bedroom-funk in the span of three tracks (‘Kepler-22b’, ‘Gaia’, ‘Ambergris’), while the lyrically potent anti-Murdoch screed ‘Evilest Man’ is sung with the urgency of a lullaby. Still, a keen sense of melody shines through even in weaker moments. With unrelenting propulsion and hair-metal duelling harmonicas, the 18-minute album opener ‘The Dripping Tap’ stands tall as a monument to the glory of Gizz. The rest is just a bonus.

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For more than two decades, Melbourne’s Black Cab have been creating electronic and post-rock marathons that deal with very particular concepts, from 1970s-era Olympics to 1988 anime classic Akira. This time, inspiration comes from the late sci-fi author/illustrator William Rotsler, who penned a tongue-in-cheek inventory of dos and don’ts for attending conventions dressed in cosplay. Black Cab salute such dress-ups on the pulsing opener ‘Superheroes,’ complete with wheeling hooks and dramatic vocoder. The two-part ‘Hannah’ pivots from swooning synth-pop to kinetic disco, while ‘Halo’ deploys New Order-style bass lines alongside recurring touchstones like Kraftwerk and Tangerine Dream. Multi-instrumentalists Andrew Coates and James Lee, plus drummer Wes Holland, began these tracks as loose jams overseen by producer Graeme Pogson (The Bamboos), and there’s a real sense of joy. For a band so driven by conceptual intricacy, Rotsler’s Rules finds Black Cab at their most open and playful yet. DOUG WALLEN

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The long-awaited debut record from this Canberra/Sydney three-piece (Rory Stenning, Del Lumanta and Daryl Prondoso) is a pivot from their previous releases, which were characterised by dubby, hypnotic pop. Here, the band are exploring darker and slower textures, fitting for an album full of nocturnal meditations on lust, love and longing. The imagery conjured on the record is similarly noir-ish, comprised of late-night phone calls, hotel rooms and ocean rips. The sound – shadowy, gloomy, downcast – is cohesive, nestling itself in the crossover crevasse of R&B, adult contemporary and synth-heavy electronica. Singer Prondoso sounds like a disaffected, doomed lounge singer, listing off failed promises and regrets (a highlight, which demonstrates Prondoso’s wonderful, deep vocal chops, is the line “It’s deep sea, honey” repeated on track ‘Honey’). The album is an impressive and immersive listen, a testament to the group’s ability to create sumptuous moods with synths, melancholic guitar and