I can take or leave Shutter Island[1]. As a film I looked forward to the dread, to the Hitchcockian wrong man thing I had been promised, to how plump DeCaprio is getting. What I got was some decent paranoia, some blackly comedic stuff but a sense that none of it added up to much. Instead of a GoodFellas, I got more of an After Hours, then. Nothing wrong per se, but no big thing either.

The soundtrack sounded interesting, though, and the end credits revealed that Robbie Robertson, late of The Band, had put the score together. He’d assembled music from some of the bigger names in the modern Classical world, and it suited the mood perfectly. Remember that crashing four-note motif from Bernard Herrmann’s original score from Cape Fear? Remember how it made you even more scared of De Niro’s Max Cady in the 1991 remake than you already were by his tattoos? Remember how it even makes Sideshow Bob a little scary now? Well the tone of this soundtrack makes that sound like Breakdance II-Electric Boogalo. If you like that sort of thing there’s some fantastic stuff here.

Take the one-two hit of the opening pieces. The first, Ingram Marshall’s Fog Tropes, uses distant foghorns and an initially distant but gradually imposing string section to put one at a little unease, never quite defining itself. It’s unsettling and a great mood setter to a doubt-filled movie. It’s followed, with a lovely foghorn segue,  by an excerpt from Penderecki’s Third Symphony, which shows that the Polish composer must have been knocking around in Herrmann’s head (get it, 90’s TV fans?) when he was working on it. By the end of the ten minutes of Fog Tropes you’re disoriented, then Penderecki smacks you around the head and neck for another ten. Amazing stuff, ideally suited to the subject, and enough reason to invest already.

We quieten down for the third piece, John Cage’s Music For Marcel Duchamp, which tings away on a piano in the same way the boring bits at the end of the Eyes Wide Shut soundtrack did, before the musique concrete nonsense of Homage to John Cage by Nam Jun Paik spends five minutes doing nothing with bits of old radios. Ligeti’s Lontano opens up a space in the soundscape and stretches languidly into it, then it’s time for the low strings and brass to scare the bejaysus out of any notion of calm you may have stupidly allowed yourself. Then the bees begin to swarm. People at your dinner party are faking calls from the babysitter, and all you wanted was to appear a little mysterious.

Things brighten up on the second disc, somewhat, beginning with the wonderful John Adams piece titled Christian Zeal and Activity. The ranting evangelist here reminds one of Mr. Finnegan from the first couple of Godspeed releases, but we know by now there is nothing new under the sun. There’s a cooling on the fourth and fifth tracks and, to be honest, two hours of this overstays the welcome just a tad. Just like the film, really. The finale, a mould (which I believe the kids call mashing or something) of Max Richter and Dinah Washington, warms cockles all over town in a Schindler’s List-tastic way. Nice, but doesn’t really fit.

I don’t know why Cry by Johnnie Ray is on here but it is, along with an Eno track and a couple other poptones; these serve to amend slightly the overriding idiom of unease, tension and implicit threat[2]. The choral part in the Morton Feldman piece here is especially impressive, a murmur of voices behind a lone violin before the single soprano voice lures you into a true sense of insecurity. And when the Mahler begins and you feel on safe home ground[3], you’ll know this collection has had the desired effect.

So what have we learned here? That the atmospherics are great, that there’s a great deal to be said for the modern composer and that I have no idea why I’d want to listen to much John Cage.  Get it for the Adams piece, the Ligeti and especially for the Penderecki, some more of which I’ll be digging out from the wife’s collection shortly.

And it wasn’t such a bad film, really.

[1] What a superb opening sentence. I only decided to write something about this album when I thought of this sentence. I like this sentence. It makes me feel happy.

[2] On reflection it may be that the pop songs are here as Marty and Robbie’s attempt to approximate the Lynchian po-mo shizzle of the Mulholland Dr. soundtrack

[3] Especially if you’re a DJ Shadow fan—this quartet is the basis for part of Building Steam with a Grain of Salt, from Endtroducing.