Filmtracks Traffic Rank: #1,008
Written 2/4/03, Revised 3/4/09
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Buy it... if Cliff Martinez's style of basic, electronic ambience and
atmospheric sound design without theme, motif, or instrumental diversity makes
for a solid background listening experience for you.
Avoid it... if neither the scores for Traffic nor Solaris is
on your shelves and you don't require the help of droning, lifeless electronic
ambience to bore you to sleep.
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| Martinez |
Narc: (Cliff Martinez) If you accept the fact that writer and
director Joe Carnahan's early 2003 release of Narc strictly adheres to all
the basic, generic guidelines of investigatory mysteries, then there's really no
redeeming element in its ultimately depressing existence. The police story explores
no new avenue in its genre, depicting a down and out cop looking to resurrect his
career after accidentally killing an unborn child. He joins with the partner of a
murdered officer to solve that new, grisly crime and the film wanders predictably
through interrogations, deception, and betrayal thereafter. Without a doubt,
Narc is the kind of film that helps you continue to lose hope in humankind,
serving no purpose but to drag down the viewer into a deeply distressing place
while failing to tackle the genre with any new technique of direction either. It
should come as no surprise, therefore, that Cliff Martinez's score for the film is
equally mind-numbing, reflecting the nightmarish environment of the film's gray
shades very accurately. The composer's distinctly electronic scores had begun to
grow a consistent following with listeners around the world in the early 2000's.
His ambient electronic score for Traffic was, despite its nearly
insufferable presentation on album, recognized for its effective role in the film,
and his more accessible and orchestrally inclined work for Solaris remained
a popular item on album despite the film's short-lived fame. For Narc,
Martinez returned to the Traffic end of that scale, abandoning the orchestra
and delving once again into the drifting, sparse realm of his solitary electronics.
At its most powerful, the music for Narc offers drum loops and
electronically altered guitar sounds that, at least momentarily, break the monotony
of the mass of Martinez's keyboarded underscore. The majority of its forty-minute
running time, however, is occupied by the subtle and sometimes nearly
indistinguishable background progressions of these keyboards. It is not atypical
for a Martinez score of this nature to feature less than ten notes in any
two-minute period of time (if even that).
Questions understandably persist about the effectiveness of these
kinds of electronic, ambient scores that strive for sound design and adhere to few
(if any) of the fundamental rules of film scores. A score without theme or motif is
not necessarily too abstract to function, but it leaves the film with the prospect
of relying heavily upon either instrumentation or rhythm to paint a sufficient
musical canvas for the topic. In the case of
Narc, there is obviously no
outward motif with which Martinez' creates an identity for the work, but there is
also no unique instrumentation (or electronic sampling, per se) and an
inconsistency in the application of rhythms. There is no sense of movement in the
music, outside of the pulsating editing effect that Martinez utilizes to give his
drab keyboarding a seemingly dull headache-imitating characteristic. Several basic
loops are employed to accentuate a slight emotion for a particular scene, but no
single loop or electronic sampling is established as the primary character of the
score. Without any of those elements strong at work, the score ceases to identify
itself as film music and, in its role as ambient sound design, functions instead is
an extension of the sound effects in the film. The dark, creepy, and metallic
groaning of a cityscape is captured adequately by Martinez, but (even more so than
in
Traffic) there isn't anything memorable about the work whatsoever. There
are a few techniques of manipulation at work that take samples and force their
lifespan into different configurations (including the usual backwards edits and
sudden stops), and these only serve to irritate the listener when attempting to
appreciate the morbid experience on album. Perhaps the most surprisingly aspect of
the
Narc score is that it fails to muster even the environment of tension
when necessary, leaving its entire mass as an incredibly boring entity. Even if it
is lifeless, non-descript background ambience that you are looking for, there are
better selections that feature at least a few musical characteristics that
establish a more coherent mood. Aside from the appropriate, but unrelated song at
the end of the album, there's nothing here to highlight. Who needs sleeping pills
when there exist albums as dead as this?
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