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UNKLE: End Titles: Stories For Film |
Contributed By: Dan Schwartz
Created On: Sunday, 29 June 2008
Hits: 155
 End Titles: Stories For Film And contains tracks interspersed with incidental music from the soundtrack for Alex Grazioli's documentary about Abel Ferrara, Odyssey In Rome. End Titles... Stories For Film features collaborations with Josh Homme (Queens Of The Stone Age), Gavin Clark (Clayhill), Joel Cadbury (South), Philip Sheppard, Black Mountain and Abel Ferrara. As befits an outfit known more for their ubiquity in the remixing world, what you get is heavy on atmosphere and light on really fine tunes. Luckily for soundtrack work this makes far more sense than on previous song-based collections.
The instrumentals here divide into short mood pieces like End Titles, Synthetic Water, Even Balance and In A Broken Dream. All give welcome pause for thought between the actual songs. Longer pieces like Trouble In Paradise tend to be Ennio Morricone-inspired slices of string sultriness, tipping into bombast at times. Meanwhile, on the songs most of the guests (and it wouldn't be an Unkle album without a host of those) have worked with Lavelle before. And most of them were featured on the band's last album, War Stories. Nocturnal (with a massed chorus of Chris Goss, James Petralli AND Robbie Furze) chugs along like a testosterone-pumped early Eno number or an LCD Soundsystem outtake.
But Chemical's skittering Buckley-esque dash is actually weakened by Josh Homme's indistinct whine. The trouble is the generic big beat-driven heroics are just TOO generic: Four-to-the-floor beats bolted together over rather cluttered productions. That said, the tracks with Clayhill's Gavin Clarke such as Blade In The Back work well, as does the bubbling, brooding Heaven. However, Open Up Your Eyes, with Abel Ferrara doing a Bob Dylan impersonation is probably best glossed over. In the end one wishes that Unkle had gone all out for a record filled with moody atmospherics. As such End Titles... only half succeeds.
 
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