4 out of 5

Label: Rough Trade Records

Produced by: Peter Raeburn

I took time on this review while I scavenged the soundtrack for meaningful themes.  For better or worse, though, much like the movie, the ‘Under the Skin’ soundtrack is gorgeous, and meticulous, but not meant for more than what it’s intended to represent.  It is, absolutely, a perfect complement to Jonathan Glazer’s film, the music a gigantic part of what made the minimalist construction of scenes work.  And the, er, richness of the sparseness is what listening to the score separately allows one to appreciate: while Mica Levi sticks mostly to the dissonance of a slow beat and strings that you hear throughout the flick, having the pieces named to mostly match to scenes allows one to consider how the slight variations – speed, pitch, what extra elements there are – affected one’s interpretation of the piece of the film to which they were applied.

But this same deconstruction is where I fall out with the soundtrack a bit, as the final two cuts – ‘Death’ and ‘Alien Loop’ – don’t feel like they sync with either the cycle of the score or the film.  We get three overall themes in the score – the clash of building strings most present in ‘Birth’ (and repeated at some important moments, such as ‘Meat to Maths’ and the transitional ‘Mirror to Vortex’); the slow clipped thud that plays during a lot of the lead character’s seductions and observations (against a black backdrop in the movie, called ‘Void’ in the song titles, such as ‘Lipstick to Void’), and a more romantic synth swelling that pops up after the lead’s ‘rebirth’ in the movie (‘Bedroom’ and ‘Love’ on the album), after which she seemingly starts to become aware of herself, and life.  From track to track, these themes are changed slightly to feel like individual compositions.  ‘Drift’ does as its title suggests, slowly falling into that syncopated beat, while ‘Lonely Void’s sparse application of that theme varies greatly from the more lascivious version in ‘Andrew Void.’  The album (and movie) come to a muted climax in ‘Bothy,’ which stands apart from the rest of the tracks and is notably darker and even more dissonant and minimal… so when ‘Death’ and ‘Loop’ play, both which lack that unique feeling, and just sound like summarized elements from previous tracks (but not in a meaningful way), it’s something of a letdown, and pulls you out of the trance the album can offer.  I will admit that that’s me maybe expecting more from the soundtrack than intended (which is a soundtrack, after all, and not an album), as the majority of the album manages to pull off the trick of existing on its own right, I can’t help but note it.

If you’re coming into this cold, and without the memory of the movie, ‘Under the Skin’ is still a fascinating listen.  Maybe not for Micachu fans, since Mica’s work under that moniker tends to be noisier, but if you’ve heard burbles about the score when you’re trolling your minimalist music blogs (you dirty dog, you), the disc is absolutely worth one’s time.  And if, like me, you’re following the film to here, you can relive your emotional highs and lows via any given track, as most offer pieces of those mentioned themes.  The score might not be able to fully stand on its own from start to finish, but it is still, undeniably, a work of carefully considered art.  (I think I ended my movie review similarly, which, like, is all clever.)  (Or lazy.)