Although ‘Avengers: Endgame’ may have captured the April box office, it’s the smaller independent movie scene that provides the month’s best scores.
Two Composers with Two Scores Each
Brian McOmber shows impressive variety with his scores for Hail Satan? and Little Woods (joined in the latter score by Malcolm Parson). In Hail Satan? McOmber sets a satirical tone by mixing pseudo-serious religious choral and organ music with lighthearted, whimsical tuba-heavy tracks. Together this serves to highlight the self-awareness of the Church of Satan while poking fun at its opponents’ complete lack thereof. Meanwhile, Little Woods is an airy and ambient thriller driven by acoustic guitar drenched in the American west.
Ben Lovett continues from where he left off in The Ritual with two more atmospheric horror scores. The Wind is a dauntingly bleak score inspired by 1800s frontier America, perfectly capturing the madness that comes from severe isolation. I Trapped the Devil captures a similar meaningless emptiness, but one that is much more insidious and unsettling, like a slowly overwhelming demonic miasma.
More Scores, for Films Both “Old” and New
The Tune Yards avantgarde score for 2018’s Sorry to Bother You has finally released. It expertly jumps across genres, from avantgarde to worldbeat to minimalism. Despite these constant shifts, the forays into each genre are well-developed and complex. In doing so they avoid the all too common missteps of trite and surface-level-only genre exploration. Together this combination creates a sense of a slowly deconstructed reality, slipping into a surreal parallel world.
Stuart A. Staples delivers a drone-heavy score in High Life, mixing the discordant with the somber and beautiful. The highlight is the score’s single, “Willow,” a slow-paced contemplative track featuring Robert Pattinson as he croons longingly to that which exists beyond.
Another highlight is Casey MQ’s Firecrackers. At times it’s reminiscent of a far more competent version of the early 2010s lo-fi electronic scene, but it slows into almost comatose levels of ambience before turning into a warped reality, most notably through the help of distorted film dialogue sampled in “Sounds of an Empty Mall.”
A Note on Endgame
Of course, the month would not be complete without mentioning Alan Silvestri’s Avengers: Endgame. The score is a rewarding listen for the die-hard Marvel fan as it re-introduces themes used throughout the 22-movie cinematic universe in both new and familiar ways. However, this recycling loses its luster when played before somewhat of a more moderate fandom, in which case the score instead buckles under its own unwieldy length. To see where Avengers: Endgame ranks among the rest of the MCU scores, click HERE.
