John Carpenter: "Fallen" (2015)

So much contemporary electronica is now anxious to look to John Carpenter for inspiration that it was only a matter of time before he released a studio album of his own material. Sure enough, Lost Themes does just that - despite its title, it’s actually a collection of original tracks, rather than discarded or projected soundtracks. At least, that’s the official story, but to fans of Carpenter’s films these tones and textures may feel very familiar indeed, drawing not merely from his horror output but from his less canonical forays into other genres as well – “Domain” has moments that wouldn’t be out of place in Memoirs of an Invisible Man, while the cheesy power chords of “Obsidian” feel drawn from Carpenter’s Elvis biopic as much as the guitar-driven soundscapes of Vampires and Ghosts of Mars. What is perhaps less familiar to a Carpenter fan, or a fan of Carpenter soundtracks, is the epic scope and scale of these nine tracks. For the most part, Carpenter’s previous albums were skeletal and minimal in structure, usually considering of a long train of rather short tracks, many of which were simply a variation on a couple of arpeggiated synth riffs. Occasionally, on special editions (often repackaged CD versions) you got a bonus track, an orchestral suite, and while they were usually somewhat exceptional and uncharacteristic, they’re probably the closest in spirit to the majority of the tracks here, each of which has to encapsulate an entire film, rather than accompany a single or specific scene. As a result, each track exhibits quite a bewildering variety of tones and instrumentation, with even the shorter, three-to-four minute suites shifting direction in quite jarring and unexpected ways. At some level, that reflects the exuberance of a soundtrack artist suddenly finding himself liberated from the more functional demands of any one film, in a studio and milieu that’s progressed in leaps and bounds since he helped pioneer it in his heyday. At the same time, though, these sudden leaps in tone also keep his music functional, maintain it as a suspense-machine, since for all that you want to assume some contemplative or historical distance from his textures, they change so rapidly and viscerally that you still feel anxious despite the fact that they’re not attached to a film any more. In that sense, “Fallen” is perhaps one of the most compelling tracks on the album, insofar as it starts like a classic Carpenter refrain, almost a Carpenter pastiche, but changes direction into something altogether darker and more remote halfway through, as if to subtly parody the peculiar brand of Carpenter-laden ambience that has become so familiar in the last couple of years in electronica. In the wake of The Ward, speculation has grown as to whether Carpenter will make another film – but in a post-cinematic age where sound and image seem more and more interchangeable, Lost Themes is perhaps the closest we’ll get, with tracks like “Fallen” as multilayered as some of his greatest works, if in miniature.

George Harrison: "Let It Roll (Ballad of Sir Frankie Crisp)" (1970)

All Things Must Pass is an odd album. Like George Harrison’s psychedelic contributions to the Beatles’ late albums, it makes such an effort to convince you how relaxed it is that it’s often not that relaxing to listen to – a meditation album build on walls of sound. For all their peaceful overtones, Harrison’s Hare Krishna chants don’t really feel that different from John Lennon’s Primal Scream experiments – both feel so determined to banish the past that it’s hard to stay in the moment, hard to stay truly mindful, in the way that seems so crucial to their respective solo debuts. In that sense, “Ballad of Sir Frankie Crisp” feels anomalous precisely because it is so in keeping with everything All Things fails to do. From the moment it starts, you can’t help but feel that you’re at the epicentre of the spiritual architecture that hangs around the album, although what’s perhaps surprising is that it isn’t an ashram but the Victorian Gothic mansion that Harrison bought in the aftermath of the Beatles’ dissolution, and which was once owned by one Sir Francis Crisp, a nineteenth-century lawyer whose eccentric epigrams scrawled into the house’s walls formed the inspiration for several of Harrison’s subsequent songs. Martin Scorsese’s Living In The Material World made it clear how much Harrison loved and tended ths house and garden, which would become his studio shortly after All Things was released, and you can hear that in the song, along with how Crisp’s odd touches and flourishes nurtured and brought out Harrison’s wackier, more playful side as well. Drenched in one of Phil Spector’s most lyrical reverb landscapes, it’s probably the only song by an ex-Beatle about coming home that really sounds convincing, which makes it quite rare and strange, especially in the middle of such a convulsive, restless album.

Scott Walker: "The Seventh Seal" (1969)

Scott Walker has reinvented himself so thoroughly in the last twenty years that it’s almost a shock to re-encounter the mellifluous singer of the 1950s and 1960s, especially when he’s as pristinely produced and packaged as he is on the opening track of Scott 4, his fourth solo album. As might be expected, “The Seventh Seal” retells Ingmar Bergman’s iconic film – or retells the key images, since it often feels as if Walker is trying to recapture the frozen musicality of Bergman’s tableaux and compositions, the way they continue to burn themselves into your consciousness once the narratives and characters they couch have faded. Given that Walker’s musical vocabulary is essentially pre-rock, it perhaps makes sense that he turns to Marty Robbins’ cowboy croon and south-of-the-border saudade to set Bergman’s images against even more widescreen landscapes than are found in the film itself, reimagining The Seventh Seal as some vast, existential Western, as well as dooming the Western to Bergman’s existential fatalism in the process. As a harbinger of doomed horizons, then, it’s hard not to also read it as a soundtrack to the acid western ambience that hit Hollywood in the late 60s and early 70s, although it seems to relegate even that moment to futile obscurity, somehow turning the experimental, countercultural present into the remotest, most irretrievable past. Yet that’s Walker’s idea of pastiche, his mission and vision as the dark angel of kitsch. Fixated on the peculiar perfume of genres doomed to die, his music decays as soon as you hear it, so ripe it has nothing left to do but rot.

Arcade Fire: "Sprawl II (Mountains Beyond Mountains)" (2010)

If Funeral and Neon Bible left you in any doubt that Arcade Fire were the descendents of Springsteen rather than U2, then The Suburbs clinches it - every song on this sprawling double album is about cars and girls in some way or another, which is all the more remarkable in that is the first time Arcade Fire have produced what might properly be called a concept album, an extension of the “Neighborhoods” song cycle to an an operatic statement of intent. That’s not exactly to say that Arcade Fire have simply embraced neo-heartland rock, though, since their perspectives incline more towards passengers than drivers, the weird world that unfolds from the backseat, people left in the car while it’s still running, wondering when and if the journey into the mythical heartland is ever going to get on its way again. In some ways, “Sprawl II” is the crowning moment in that aborted journey, leading on the the instrumental, almost classical reprise of the title track that closes out the album. Starting out as a bad-day-at-work song, it quickly expands and expands into a kind of prophetic vision of medium-town, big-box America, a jeremiad in texture if not quite in tone, if only because it’s so gloriously attuned to nu-80s production – or perhaps just noughties production – that it can’t help but feel slightly jubilant as well, can’t help but believe that such a sheer mass of people must mean some kind of community or fraternity. For that reason, it not only feels like music about the suburbs for people who never lived through the great suburban heyday that Arcade Fire elegise, but music for people who have never seen the suburbs full stop, music for a world in which suburbs and urban cores don’t really  exist in any discernible way any more. And, without suburbs and urban cores, driving, at least as heartland rock conceives it, doesn’t quite exist any more, since there’s no real destination, nothing left for the heartland to define itself against. One of the strangest things about The Suburbs,  then, is that it is music about driving, but not really music for drivers. At most, it’s music for people being driven, people who spend all day in the backseat without ever stepping into a car on their daily commute - stadium rock, like Springsteen’s, that still seems to be living in the shadows.

Chromatics: "Running From The Sun" (2012)

Over the last few years, social media has well and truly colonised the car. Not only can we now plug our SmartPhones into our cars in any number of ways, but GPS navigation has reached such a degree of omniscience that it often seems as if a fully-formed digital topography has more or less replaced our analog streets and highways. Depictions of driving in popular visual culture haven’t lagged far behind, to the point where it’s become commonplace for film and television directors to treat windscreens as digital screens, overlaying car scenes with phone conversations and GPS instructions. However, if the car has contracted to SmartPhone and GPS devices, then those devices have also ballooned to incorporate what used to be the hermetic mindspace of the solitary driver. Cars may have become a part of digital media, but digital media has in turn internalised something of the lingering loneliness of late-night car travel. As their recent album Kill For Love reinforced, Chromatics are very much attuned to this moment, crafting driving soundtracks for solitary iPhone listening, music for driving only in the sense that Brian Eno envisaged music for airports. “Running From The Sun” is one of the longer tracks on Kill For Love, and its lyrics are suffused with the restless sense of the road that weaves togethers Chromatics’ various 80s influences – an elevation of the windscreen to an end in itself, a gathering of all arrivals and departures into some as-yet unfulfilled information horizon. Singing from the other side of that horizon, Johnny Jewel’s autotunes yearn for it in retrospect, pine for that same odd combination of arrival and departure, except that it’s strangely deflated here, more like a lack of net movement than anything else, an ambience that gradually distends into a reflexive impotence. If plugging into the network once spun you out onto some desolate, interminable highway, then Chromatics are way past the point of unplugging, way beyond the receding offramps and last exits of, say, the Junior Boys. Instead, they teach you to live through a circadian carsickness that just goes on and on, like the interminable last chords of this heartbreaking track, until you’re too numb to fully register the fleeting, final sounds of morning, of a new day dawning, of something resembling a destination.