Mike Patton ‘1922’ Soundtrack Review: musician’s avant-garde score for the Netflix Stephen King adaptation is a suitably sinister and haunting soundtrack.
[rating=5]
The world of Stephen King has been alive and well thanks to the recent success of It, the Netflix adaptation of Gerald’s Game (directed by Mike Flanagan), and the upcoming Hulu series Castle Rock.
Less heralded, yet just as noteworthy, was 1922, Flanagan’s adaptation of King’s novella of the same name. The film (which also aired on Netflix) was a deeply unnerving hallucinatory thriller about a farmer (Thomas Jane), who along with his son, murders his wife for financial gain. As is typical for King stories with troubled protagonists, things don’t go well, and disturbing and gruesome scenarios abound. And rats. Lots of rats.
To score the project, Flanagan reached out to Mike Patton, the man of a 1000 voices, who despite being best known as the vocalist for Faith No More has lent his sterling pipes to an assortment of musical acts over the years, including the self-titled 2017 début of hardcore outfit Dead Cross.
But Patton has also dabbled in instrumental soundtrack work, on films as disparate as Crank: High Voltage to The Place Beyond The Pines, and his work for 1922 shows a new dimension to his compositional prowess.
Kicking off with No Grave For Mama, which conjures appropriate visions of skittering vermin and creaking floorboards, Patton walks a fine, discerning line between haunting melody and unnerving dissonance, from the funereal tones of Mea Culpa to the piercing strings of Sweetheart Bandits.
Death of a Marriage marries industrial overtones and found percussion while Murder is Work’s plucked strings perfectly encapsulate the nasty business involved in the film.
At times Patton’s dour yet beautiful score brings to mind the works of Angelo Badalamenti, known for his frequent collaborations with filmmaker David Lynch. Given his fondness for Lynch’s work, this perhaps comes as no surprise.
But this is a Patton tour-de-force all the way, working in his own peculiar sandbox, from the sparse thrumming This as Thieves to the frenzied string freakout Elphis and dusky, nightmarish soundscapes like We’ll Send Her To Heaven and The Conniving Man. The final track, Sweetheart Bandits 2: We All Get Caught is as unforgiving and caustic as the source material demands, yet still weaves a beautiful melody throughout the caustic atmospherics.
Even by King’s own dark standards, 1922 ranks among the darkest and most unforgiving adaptations of his work, and Patton’s score ably supports its grim and nightmarish themes. It also stands up as a musical statement in its own right, and should even thrill Patton obsessives who’ve never even the seen the film his work was composed for.
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