REVIEW: The Dust Brothers, Fight Club Soundtrack (Restless)
- Michelle Aguilar
I've not yet seen the much-talked-about movie Fight Club, but I bet it takes place in a city; at least, it better take place in a city, because if there's anything that the Dust Brothers' instrumental soundtrack to this movie suggests, it's urban grit and grime. Even when they're looping in the sound of Gregorian monks singing in a cathedral ("Homework"), the feel is not Old Europe but the depths of an American city, a city trapped in an unconscious mechanical repetition of movement so routinized that the inhabitants don't know that they are caught in the throes of an irreversible decay.
Much of this soundtrack would also be very conducive to a long, stormy night drive on a superhighway. Its constant movement, coupled with a complete lack of warmth, feels at times like being hermetically sealed in a fast, expensive car, wondering idly about the ugly locales hurtling by that are too dangerous and too decrepit to tempt one into disembarking from the sealed environment within.
Despite the wide expanses sonically suggested by the Brothers' sizzling keyboard swells (including warm bits of a Fender Rhodes keyboard here and there), electric sitar, harpsichord, carillon and harp, nothing on this soundtrack (and this includes the Gregorian monks) sounds remotely lush, natural, or pastoral.
In interviews, John King and Ed Simpson said that they and director David Fincher wanted to create a soundtrack in which the listener can not rely on cues in the music itself to interpret the movie characters' intentions or anticipate the plot's movement. Their aim was to create music that instilled comfort, fear, transcendence and distress at any given moment, with little rhyme or reason.
At first, this would seem to make Fight Club an anti-soundtrack, counter-intuitive to the traditional purpose of the genre. After all, where would we be without "Psycho"'s screeching violins to heighten our fear of what's coming? Or, how would "Star Wars" fare without its blaring symphonies to let us know when it's time to root for the home team? But in fact, the Dust Brothers' approach here does work to create a mood -- one of confusion and paranoia. It is a vision of a dark hellhole of a world in which there is no one and nothing to rely on except oneself.
Take for example, the track "Corporate World," an excellent and somewhat disturbing representation of its title. The song begins with a wonderful '50s samba clave, punctuated by delicious scratching and layers of quirky, pitched-down flute, brass and high scale piano, evoking a slightly twisted Brasil '66 or Herb Alpert's Tijuana Brass. This musical sendup of the anachronistic corporate culture could at first have easily been the backing track to the next Beck hit.
Given the eerie, stripped-down dystopian beats and eerie keyboards the Dust Brothers have been offering up to this point, "Corporate World" at first feels like stumbling onto a welcome, albeit slightly strange, respite of brightness and light in this dark world. But then of course, there is something morbid and unsettling just below the surface here. The Brothers quickly go south and the song suddenly shifts into low gear, as all the tasty instrumentation dissolves into a low keyboard-driven drone stuck inside a web of reverb. Enter a brief cut of horror movie violins (ok, so they do fall back on these old tricks sometimes) that greet us for a moment. Then, we are soon thrust back into our dark hole, into the numb coldness of drum machines and what seems like a sitar riff stuck in permanent, trance-like repeat.
The lesson? Appearances are deceiving. Underneath all the gleaming faces you meet is rotting flesh in the process of dying. Do not believe in them. Only believe in yourself and your own senses.
Ironically, some of the tricks King and Simpson use to glue this disturbing collection of songs together are the same ones they have used to much warmer effect on their albums for other artists, particularly Beck and the Beastie Boys. The Dust Brothers' characteristic beat drops, sudden bursts of looped noise, abrupt cut-and-paste shifts in instrumentation and unexpected mood changes, especially in tracks like "Single Serving Jack," and "Space Monkeys," are like ghostly bits and pieces from 1989's Paul's Boutique and 1996's Odelay. Here there are used masterfully to create tension and a general distress. For trip-hop and trance fans whose tastes run towards the darker edges, this is a great body of songs in which to lose oneself.
But this is not the kind of album that's going to drag your typical clubber out onto the dance floor. While the Fight Club soundtrack mixes equal elements of 808 simplicity, Trance, Jungle and Trip-Hop, weaving in and out between tracks seamlessly, this is not a traditional dance album. It's more the kind of album you want to lie in the dark listening to at top volume, letting its eerie, unfamiliar sonic landscape get inside your head until it feels like an organic part of your thoughts.
