Filmtracks: Argylle (Lorne Balfe/Various)

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Written 2/16/24

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Buy it... if you can be fulfilled by a fabulous power anthem as a main theme, its performances providing Lorne Balfe melodicism at its guilty pleasure best.

Avoid it... if you expect this score to nail its target as a parody work, Balfe and his sizeable crew struggling to find the right balance between stylish pizazz and serious resolve.

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Argylle: (Lorne Balfe/Various) While the thought of having filmmaker Matthew Vaughn devise a spin-off of the Kingsman franchise may have seemed a good idea to Apple, the resulting Argylle in early 2024 proved to be a monumental dud. With a nearly incomprehensible plot, Vaughn's film introduces audiences to a writer of spy novels who is much further intertwined in the espionage industry than even she knows. When real-life intelligence agents and James Bond-like villain organizations take an interest in her writings, she traverses a perilous path that illuminates her as someone she didn't even know she was, a key to all sorts of global plots. Expect plenty of double-crosses, bent-realities, and senseless CGI action. Some reports speculated that the movie could lose Apple hundreds of millions of dollars. With so much of the production of Argylle needlessly complicated, it's not surprising that the soundtrack situation for the movie is equally multifaceted. Intriguingly, but not necessarily to the movie's benefit, Vaughn was supplied the right to the "new" Beatles song "Now and Then" and chose to adapt it instrumentally into the film. He also obtained services from Ariana DeBose, Boy George, and Nile Rodgers, among others, for a pair of new songs to evoke the era of the 1970's for purposes of spy intrigue. (DeBose appears as a character in the film.) Tasked with wrapping all this ambition together is coordinator and producer extraordinaire, Lorne Balfe, who replaces Henry Jackman and Matthew Margeson as Vaughn's franchise composer of the moment. Balfe receives co-compositional credit with the above artists for the new songs, and he was responsible for translating The Beatles material into functional score cues in ways that listeners may recognize from the memorable use of John Denver's "Take Me Home, Country Roads" in Kingsman: The Golden Circle. Along with all that song adaptation work, Balfe was also tasked with the rest of the score, which references the songs in part and attempts to straddle the line between parody and genuine action.

Not surprisingly, the Balfe production machine employs at least ten additional composers, six orchestrators, and four conductors for this assignment. Cue attribution is vaguely available for some of these artists, but given that very few listeners will know exactly what music was written or adapted by whom within any given cue, they are all ostensibly ghostwriters. That said, cue by cue credits do indicate that Balfe wrote the score's original themes, one with some input from Vaughn, interestingly, and the ghostwriting group functioned again as an arrangement and filler crew. Some of these assistants appear not to have any music on the album presentation of the score. The end result for Argylle, not surprisingly, is music with a strong central core but wayward execution throughout. There are no outward connections to the Kingsman scores, the overarching style more comfortable between Balfe's own Terminator Genisys and the action of his Mission: Impossible entries. The most baffling aspect of this music is Balfe's seeming indecision about how thoroughly to embrace the parody element. He comes very close at times to outright humor, as in "Yellow Shirt," but he never sustains that attitude long enough to yield a consistently entertaining parody mode. While the key to good parody music is the act of playing ridiculous situations straight, there has to be an abundance of snazzy personality to accompany the overblown elements. Here, we get the overblown aspect but not the sense of high style, which simply makes parts of this score sound like a pounding, Remote Control Productions-derivative product that masks its intelligence with mere overstatement. The same exact issue plagues the two original songs for Argylle, "Electric Energy" a highly annoying disco throwback and the James Bond song-aspiring "Get Up and Start Again" building to bombastic vocal force in the latter portion that largely ruins its appeal. On the other hand, some listeners may appreciate "Get Up and Start Again" as a decent, vintage pop song that borrows much from the performance inflection and brass structures of Adele's classic song for Skyfall.

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The tone of Balfe's toil for Argylle is largely familiar, a sizable orchestral foundation joined by an array of synthetic augmentation and post-production mixing techniques that bolster the score's power and give it the occasional sound of outright synth augmentation. A choir affords near-fantasy ambience for choice moments. All of it will be highly familiar to Balfe's enthusiasts, though there are some notable accents. A ticking clock sounds in "Enjoy the Ride," warped metal effects are most prominent early in "Spoon Spy," and the choir imitates a cat meow in John Powell fashion at 1:01 into "The Spy Who Scratched Me," where violins even try the same effect. A saxophone contributes flashes of style in "Double Crosser" and especially "Careless Whisker" while "Furocious" contains some absolutely frenetic string chopping and a vuvuzela horn-like effect for the villain theme. There are three recurring themes in Argylle, two of which original and only one totally disconnected from the songs associated with the movie. All of them receive dedicated suite tracks on the album release. The driving force of the score is Balfe's main Argylle theme, which utilizes a primary phrase based on the song "Get Up and Start Again" and contains unidentified secondary phrasing credited to Vaughn, possibly in one of its three-note accents. The prominent descending counterpoint lines against the ascending main melody are very satisfying in this identity. Extensively developed in glorious, full, power anthem form in "Argylle's Theme," the idea plays here like a blend of Trevor Rabin's 1990's action and a heavy influence from Terminator Genisys. From the perspective of retro power anthems, this one is a clear winner. In the score proper, the theme's descending counterpoint figures are heard early in "Mini Moke Mayhem" before a bubbly, hyperactive action version of the theme pops at 0:55 with enhanced synth effects. The idea is lightly expressed by woodwinds later in "Serve the Same Master," slowly builds momentum on strings in "Argylle in Hong Kong," uses its soft counterpoint lines to open "This Seat is Taken" where they left off in "Argylle in Hong Kong," and appears for a quick moment in the middle of "Enjoy the Ride" while quietly meandering through "Aiden & Elly."

The main theme continues to dominate the score for Argylle as it prominently opens "The Spy Who Scratched Me" with bluster on brass and maintaining a muscular stance from those players throughout the cue. It is reduced to solo piano at the outset of "Argylle in the Mirror," nicely ponderous thereafter, and is tortured by synthy-mixed strings in "Parental Misguidance." The theme is afforded more heft in the slow string drama of "Do You Think I'm OK," but its demeanor is a tad overplayed here. The alluring counterpoint lines of the theme open the long, solely Balfe-credited cue "Alfie," a moment that develops into an extension of the melodramatic string version of the main melody. Unfortunately, the cue erupts into another synthetic-sounding or post-production manipulated brass crescendo with pounding bass notes at its end. A soft, anthemic rendition of the melody with rambling electronic keyboards opens "Rachel's Story," and it emerges with hope in the middle of "Al-Badr Palace," including some half-hearted Arabian tilt at the end. The idea is carried by espionage-appropriate trumpets at the start of "Double Crosser," and this increasingly stylish approach becomes a bit more extroverted and snazzy from brass layers throughout "Mama's Gotta Go to Work," yielding an overtly pompous conclusion. The theme supplies a vintage Bond-like dramatic moment during "Satelite Signals" (the cue is misspelled on the album), and it's translated into a tender, syrupy variant on strings early in "You Missed." Balfe continues that same spirit at the start of "Concluding the Argylle Saga," where a pretty homage to John Barry's You Only Live Twice influences in the string counterpoint accents against choir. A seldom-employed harp then carries the descending lines along with whimsical strings for almost parody usage at this point, though the cue is undoubtedly lovely. The composer then teases the theme at the culmination of "Yellow Shirt" in even more near-parody applications. The use of this theme throughout Argylle is admirably spotted, and it produces many of the score's clear highlights, but there's something missing from its soul. Its anthemic tendencies don't always mix well with the espionage style implied by the genre and other parts of the score, so its promise is sometimes unrealized in the action material, especially as the score progresses. Still, it's among Balfe's best career themes when it is allowed to flow uninhibited.

The other frequently accessed theme in Argylle represents the movie's obligatory organization of villains. This Division theme is built around rising five-note phrases of twisted aspiration followed by unceremonious descending pairs. It's somewhat sinister in an expected fashion and summarized with organ and thumping, percussive drive in "The Division Theme." This idea supplies menace to the opening moments of "Mini Moke Mayhem," stewing on brass in between main theme performances. It provides a false crescendo of suspense early in "Serve the Same Master" before consolidating into its proper form, and it interjects with creepiness in the middle of "Aiden & Elly" with the return of the organ backing. The villains' theme expresses some confidence with its secondary phrasing in "Spoon Spy," becomes jagged and extremely aggressive in the staccato movements of "Parental Misguidance," and returns with subtle organ for a performance early in the middle of "Rachel's Story," the motif elongated for more dramatic depth later in the cue. It broods in deep bass layers in the first half of "Al-Badr Palace" but pounds away at the forefront again with significant force in "Double Crosser," eventually withdrawing to more a contemplative mode later. Finally, it slaps you in the face with the vuvuzela horn-like effect in "Furocious." The last theme in Argylle is the symphonic adaptation of the "new" Beatles song "Now and Then," which had been completed with the help of artificial intelligence and released not long before. Used as the theme for the lead writer, the melody doesn't really fit well with the rest of the score, as it comes across as an appendage forced into the picture simply because it was offered for use. It's heard in only two major cues represented on album, "Elly's Writing Theme" and "Now and Then (Argylle Symphony)." Both are oddly dramatically overblown, the brass and choir way too epic to serve this purpose well. Related sensitivity is explored on piano in the latter half of "This Seat is Taken," but Balfe never develops it beyond that. Its presence reinforces the "too many cooks in the kitchen" feeling that the score for Argylle generates. The "Argylle's Theme" arrangement is fabulous as a power anthem, and a few of that idea's interpolations in the work are equally attractive. These moments make the whole a solid recommendation. But the rest lacks the cohesive sense of stylish pizzazz to make it a successful parody score while also failing to achieve convincing coolness to be taken seriously. The potential for a roaring five-star score was somehow lost in the process. **** @Amazon.com: CD or Download

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For Lorne Balfe reviews at Filmtracks, the average editorial rating is 2.83 (in 30 reviews) and the average viewer rating is 2.86 (in 23,487 votes). The maximum rating is 5 stars.

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