Cinematic scores can often be just nice music and a collection of incidental sounds that play whilst a film runs across a screen in front of you. But they can also be so much more than that. Hans Zimmer was asked to tone down his score for The Da Vinci Code so that the film could be granted the lower, more family-friendly certificate that its makers were looking for. And Alfred Hitchcock famously said that 33% of the impact of Psycho was due to Bernard Herrmann’s dramatic score.
And it is to that great film composer that Michael Bradford turns for his latest album The Man Behind the Curtain. It is interesting that we live in an age where covers and reworkings of popular songs seem as prevalent as ever, yet music derived from what is seen as a more serious form is often deemed untouchable.
Here, however, Michael Bradford isn’t afraid to cross that line, and he takes some of Herrmann’s best-known works and transforms them into noirish, downtempo electronica, a neat blend of orchestral grace and trip-hop groove.
The album opens with the current single, “Vertigo Theme,” featuring disquieting vocal work from Alicia Witt and a wonderful blend of hypnotic sonics and claustrophobic classical sounds —a soundtrack for a debate on AI, the advancement of technology, and whether these artificies and facimilies could ever replace the human connection, the human heart.
That infamous and instantly recognisable sound of slashing ebbs and flows around Norman Bates lines, that compelling balance of the mundane and truly terrifying, as “Psycho Prelude” proves to be both a timeless and, given that the film has recently celebrated its 65th birthday, timely creation.
“The City,” and “Hotel Room” also part of the Psycho score, are laced with reggae grooves, a nod back to Bradford’s own musical past, and “Carlotta’s Portrait” feels like a jam between Portishead and Vangelis.
What Michael Bradford does so well here is that whilst he opens new doors for these excellent sonic creations to walk through, gives them new leases of life, he never loses the sense of suspense, atmosphere, and often sheer terror that is part of their musical DNA. In fact, at times, he even creates more tension and anticipation. This is a man who implicitly and unarguably understands the nature of the material he is working with.
Someone —a better writer than I —described this album as “Alfred Trip-Hop,” and as a soundbite, I don’t think that could ever be bettered.
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