This is the first time Duglas Stewart (BMX Bandits) has written a film score, collaborating with Andrew Pattie to create the soundtrack to Mark MacNichol's directing debut Dreaded Light. I haven't seen the film and have no idea of what the film is about, or where and when it's set, I have just taken how the music makes me feel and the song titles as clues to what's going on. Only watching the films trailer after writing this review.
As you'd expect this soundtrack opens with Theme From Dreaded Light a quite gentle bucolic tune with washes of sound coming through here and there against the acoustic guitar and angelic voices.
Mysterious Nurse feels elegiac, acoustic guitar, piano and recorder serenely calm, hummed middle part echoes from the walls.
Shutting Out The Light has sustaining strings with a searching piano line, that leads into Urination Jazz a late night Smokey stroll into the toilets, a sultry voice whispers at you as you urinate.
I Heard A Baby Crying is strangely calm for the title, with a sense of someone being bereft at the thought of that Baby Crying.
Early One Morning (What's Wrong With You) has an intense dream like quality, to wonder exactly what is wrong. Kettle O'Worms is disturbing as if you've been dropped in that kettle, as you fight to get out, frantic jazz giving way to a kettle whistle being played disturbingly.
Night Riding sounds like a Hans Lundin tune from the early 80's, with ponderous synths and a bell. Tuning In is exactly as suggested, the sounds of someone fine tuning a radio signal with all sorts of interference and mad noises.
Love Theme is gorgeous music to open your arms and allow the one you love to fully embrace you in a wonderful cuddle.
Long Forgotten Summers Day is the first of two songs on the album, it sounds like something on the Belle & Sebastian tv series soundtrack, it's neo classical chamber pop with odd bird song elements.
Smorgans is long slow tones, piano slowly coming in to work around the synth bursts and washes of sound.
Early One Morning (Reprise) is a short Intense swirl of strings. Duncan's Theme has a very early 70's school holidays Tv soundtrack feel to it, whatever Duncan is up too, it's in a very calm deliberate way judging by this music.
Family Values seems to be all about what happens around that cymbal beat. SAT NAVs And Drugs starts off calm and then had disruptive synths that sound like something real bad is about to happen.
A Dark Figure has a glockenspiel that has lots of foreboding synth washes running over it. Twist The Knife is more gentle strings with the same figure from the last tune now played on piano rather than glockenspiel as other elements add to a sense of dislocation, impending denouement.
Never Come Back is ambient pulsing, dramatic piano parts and voices from the soundtrack in the middle of an argument, babbling reversing speeding up ever more dislocated.
New Revelations has a classical hymnal feel, as everyone sways gently in the pews. Discovering Duncan has a funereal piano that feels like a slow walk in a dark and foreboding wood.
Thrilling is the most upbeat tune on the album, with some searing guitar, cool backing vocals, it feels like someone is driving through the mountains to this tune.
The album closes with Spinning Through Time, as the credits roll, this slow elegiac goodbye to a lover who has left far too soon, this feels like a lullaby as the strings caress, a snare drum slowly beats the retreat, words of love slowly explain how no matter what you will be lovers for all eternity, it may be sentimental, but sounds like it may well have audiences blubbing with tears at the films close.
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