Album Review: Mike Patton - 1922 Original Motion Picture Soundtrack

1922 is a film about a farmer that murders his wife, and then faces a reckoning as his life slowly rots away around him.

Based on a Stephen King novella, it's a pitch-black morality tale soaked in Southern Gothic atmosphere and creeping dread. Mike Patton was obviously the man to score it.

His second effort as a film composer (after The Place Beyond The Pines) is wildly successful in its attempt to portray the biblical nature of the man's cardinal sin and his descent into madness. The prickly staccato, swarms of strings and percussion underline the tension surrounding the house pre and post-murder, and the baroque stateliness of his two bookends, the Sweetheart Bandits duet, evokes the sense that God personally looks down on this little man and his patch of dirt, condemning him. In other moments, Patton demonstrates the earthly nature of the difficulties faced by the father and his abetting son; Murder Is Work is a dry, plucked-string piece that has a methodical folk-y quality.

The film is a chilling character study, and Patton's score is an excellent companion. It's rich and dark with an impressive range of analogue instruments all scratching and clawing and biting their way through the mix like rats through drywall. It's beautiful and dreadful to listen to.