Matthew Herbert

Score

(!K7)

Record Review by Adam McKibbin

Flush with the success of last year’s Scale, experimental electronic composer Matthew Herbert has gone into retrospective mode:  first with a reissue of his 1996 album 100 lbs. and now with Score, which anthologizes his eclectic body of work as a film composer.  Herbert is famous for, among other things, methodology—specifically, working within self-imposed restrictions (generating sound solely with his own body, for instance).  Film scoring is often a world of limitation on itself, not only because of the very nature of scoring—it’s intended to enhance a larger piece of art rather than service and showcase its own whims, first and foremost—but also because directors often seek out composers not based on what they’re capable of doing but based on what they’ve done; when a filmmaker gets Jon Brion on the phone, chances are they want something close to the Magnolia / Eternal Sunshine template—not to find out whether Brion can do a smoky jazz score.

But Herbert sounds fairly liberated on Score, though, especially since it isn’t a given that the director of Vida Y Color, wanting mournful cinematic strings, would say “Get me the man who did the swinging score for Le Defi!”  But Herbert again finds fruit under wildly variable working conditions.  Excursions with his Big Band aside, Herbert is best known for house music—a genre largely left at the gates of Score, aside from some glitchy flourishes here and there, as on the jubilant “Singing in the Rain.”  In its place, he moves from telling titled set pieces like “Funeral” and brassy, Technicolor numbers like “Rivoli Shuffle,” one of the highlights.  “Rendezvous” stands apart as 10-minute-plus accompanying piece for a performance by a dance company—some performance it must have been; Herbert starts with minimal electronic blips and heartbeats, then introduces a cathedral-raising choir.  The ingredients are dramatic but relatively ordinary; it’s the unexpected combination that makes them worthwhile.

In sum, Score can’t measure up in the thrills department with the best of Herbert’s “proper” releases, but it’s another testament to his adventurous spirit and, perhaps more revelatory, his chameleon-like talents as a composer.  With that said, Score, like 100 Lbs, leaves the listener anxious to hear what’s next from Herbert, rather than what they may have missed the first time around.