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Review of Narc (Cliff Martinez)

FILMTRACKS RECOMMENDS:

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.

FILMTRACKS EDITORIAL REVIEW:

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?  *

TRACK LISTINGS:

Total Time: 42:24

• 1. Big Catherine, Little Catherine (2:33) • 2. Kick My Ass in the Morning (2:32) • 3. The Bloody Leg (2:25) • 4. Narc (2:18) • 5. Something to Do (1:19) • 6. I Love You Baby (1:19) • 7. Let's Sit on the House (1:15) • 8. Girl in the Closet (3:27) • 9. Crime Scene (1:51) • 10. Notice Anything Strange? (1:59) • 11. Don't Let It Happen Again (2:06) • 12. You Hit? (2:19) • 13. I'm Still Gonna Leave (2:00) • 14. I Wanna Check this Place Out (1:41) • 15. Freeze (1:00) • 16. This is It (1:15) • 17. Tell Me the Truth (4:44) • 18. Provoked - performed by Baby Namboos (6:23)

NOTES & QUOTES:

The insert includes no extra information about the score or film.

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The reviews and other textual content contained on the filmtracks.com site may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed without the prior written authority of Christian Clemmensen at Filmtracks Publications. All artwork and sound clips from Narc are Copyright © 2003, TVT Soundtrax and cannot be redistributed without the label's expressed written consent. Page created 2/4/03 and last updated 3/4/09.