CD: From Inside (2008)

October 31, 2014 | By Mark R. Hasan

Score: Very Good

Released: October 7, 2014

Tracks / Album Length: 21 tracks / (75 mins.)

Composers: Gary Numan, Ade Fenton

Special Notes: (none)

Review:

Gary Numan’s second film score so far (after 1991’s The Unborn) is a collaboration with Ade Fenton for John Bergin’s own animated film version of his post-apocalyptic graphic novel. Unsurprisingly, the instrumental palette is comprised of industrial electronica, sampled and real chorals, feedback, and recurring motifs to accentuate the doom & gloom patina of Bergin’s world.

“The Train” establishes the main theme through sampled vocals, as well as the score’s industrial percussion style, whereas subsequent tracks offer broader thematic material and variations of the title track’s rhythmic patterns. The reliance on a singular theme does get a little heavy by the album’s final third, largely because the theme isn’t fully developed, but there’s a nice contrast between the grunge and the ethereal, especially in the use of chorals for gentler theme versions (“On a Red Lake”), or a child’s song that follows the motif of dragged metal in “The Empty House.”

The digitally processed sounds are warmly analogue, making some of the score’s elements (such as sampled strings and reverse-processed sounds) soothing, and although the angry percussive material of early cues is largely diluted in subsequent stripped-down and impressionistic versions (notably for keyboard in the eerie “Cee, The Light”), the shift to material that’s more introspective and harmonic is affecting, and closes the score with a decisive dramatic mood in spite of there being no formal end credits (perhaps reserved in the film for a song).

Lakeshore Records’ album (an expanded reissue of their 61 min. 2012 release with five meaty new tracks) is nicely mastered, and fans of Numan’s heavy electronic sounds should be pleased with the relative balance of addictive percussion and rather ethereal harmonics.

Additional Links:
Editor’s Blog — Composer on IMDB — Composer Filmography — Soundtrack Album

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Tags: Ade Fenton, From Inside (2008), Gary Numan, John Bergin