omposer Christopher Young has added to his enviable catalog of film scores—Wonder Boys, Hellraiser, Species, Bless the Child, Runaway Jury, Shipping News and The Tower—with this CD for Varèse Sarabande.
It would seem that Young, who's been writing scores for more than 10 years, has been a favorite of directors of horror films. In the past, he has occasionally used some sound effects to bolster the mood, as in his work for Hellraiser, when he worked in some effects that bring to mind the dark, extra-dimensional abode of the Cenobites. The Grudge takes this idea further.
In fact, at times his music for the film, which is the American remake of the successful Japanese spooker Ju-on with the same director, is almost like musique concrète, a type of electronic music that is produced by editing together bits of natural and industrial sounds.
Essentially, the score consists of one piece of music with eight movements. The first track ("Ju-on"; they're all called "Ju-on," which seems somehow more appropriate than tacking descriptive names on them) builds nicely up through some miasmic organ chords and strings, with very faint background wails by the disc's barely heard vocalist, Tiffany Gyomber. The theme makes its first appearance with what sounds rather like a Fender Rhodes patch. It's suitably moody, with hints of "Tubular Bells" in the repetitive riff, with its disquieting intervals. Surging chords bolster it, however, gradually growing louder and more insistent.
Track Two sounds less like music and more like something the flick's Foley artist might have put together after listening to Revolution Number Nine. Along about 1:25 there's the first of many "stings" that underscore particularly tense moments in the film. Then the piece turns very raucous, with looping strings and thundering percussion. These fade away quickly, however, leaving what could almost be called a musical void of breathy synth passages that build again into jittery insect-like strings.
Track three is more musical, with the melancholy little theme restated in a number of ways on piano. Again, at the end it fades away into almost nothing, with a coda that sounds like a distant clock tolling the hour. The disc's seventh band (the longest, at 12:37) gets positively Hitchcockian midway through, with the strings going berserk and sounding like a flock of crazed birds, with hints of Psycho. It's nothing if not unsettling.
Tunes that jump out and grab you
And "unsettling" is the best way of describing this score. The disc's most successful moments deploy synth sound patches in a generally effective way. The music is well suited for the picture, which like many ghost stories has a number of "jump out at you" moments strung together with "what the hell is going on" sequences with the characters floundering around at loose ends.
Of course, the musical "stings" that accompany these moments serve only as emphasis. Ultimately, anyone can suddenly bang a drum or kick someone's chair to give a jolt. The Grudge is better than that, but the thought blasphemously obtrudes that such moments on the CD are really just "gotchas."
As a whole, the show is well produced and performed. The major disappointment is the packaging. There's nothing inside except a few pictures from the movie, and only some minimal information on the back, such as names of those responsible for "electronic music design" and synth programming. A personal statement from Young, even a brief one, wouldn't have been out of line.
