3 out of 5

Label: Broken Press

Produced by: APC

Originally a live – and I believe improvised – score to the classic Black Christmas, compiled from various sessions to be reworked into this album. Recorded in 2017, that places it chronologically before the similarly contrived “Bud” score, with a major difference: I’d say this score (and the new title) casts Black Christmas as a horror movie, which it already is, whereas Bud feels kind of kitschy by design, framing its scored film – Air Bud – as a drama. And if you’ve seen Air Bud…

Normally, my narrative here would be that a project would get “better” the second time around, but I was pretty cool on Bud. I could flip-flop things and say that Tim Call and Andrew Crawshaw weren’t as comfortable pushing the concept in 2017 as they were in 2018, and / or maybe the pairing of Call with Crawshaw was drastically different than working with Justin Thomas Kleine on Bud, but instead, I’ll just blame my bias: my ‘kitschy’ eyerolls weren’t triggered by this one because of the exception I mentioned, so I was a lot more amenable to this outing.

It does suffer from a very similar problem to the Bud score: a lack of narrative, which is further obscured by calling every track a generic Sequence ## number. While some musical themes are much more present here than in the largely ambient Air Bud redo, the middle run of Sequences are very start and stop, and create atmosphere only within those start and stops – not together. The beginning of the set is much more successful, and though the run of longer concluding tracks kind of all feel like end credits, just by having the longer runtimes, they’re able to accomplish more. The obfuscating naming, and picking up on this being a collection of various sessions, makes me wonder if the score was reordered for home listening purposes, but whether that ended up being better than the live version, I can’t say – I can just comment on what I’m hearing, which is still kind of fractured.

The individual tracks are pretty great though, taking a minimalistic beat of varying intensities and layering on Crawshaw’s heavy atmospherics, and the artwork – given that this whole venture started as a printing press – is pretty great, sticking with the classic horror homage.

An interesting experiment, but I’d be interested in hearing a version of this designed for an album and not rejiggered from live sets.