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Review of Nope (Michael Abels)

FILMTRACKS RECOMMENDS:

Buy it... only if you can absorb oddball horror scores defined by their persistently aggravating suspense, especially if you appreciated the unusually broad applications of music in the film.

Avoid it... if you approach your fantasy scores with the expectation of dynamic ensemble performances, cohesive narrative arcs, and sensible genre boundaries, none of which adhered to in this recording.

FILMTRACKS EDITORIAL REVIEW:

Nope: (Michael Abels) Blurring the lines between several genres is the ambitiously weird horror fantasy Western Nope, a 2022 spectacle of the bizarre that, with writer and director Jordan Peele at the helm, begs consideration of race relations as well. The premise of the plot is magnificent, suggesting that a horse ranch in rural California is the site of UFO abductions that turn out to involve a creature not much unlike a wild animal needing tamed to the same extent as the horses on the ranch. Desperate efforts to learn about the deadly entity, complicated by the exploitation of the circumstances by media-savvy types, yield mostly mystery and mass death. A pair of African American siblings inherits the ranch from their father when he is among those killed on the property, and their bonding and some development of intriguing secondary characters carries the film. It's a brutally bizarre, nightmare inducing affair on the whole, though, with blood raining down from the sky, a chimp massacring people on the set of a television show, and a UFO in search of lunch chasing a black dude on horseback. (Okay, that last one is cool.) The originality of the film's story led Peele to ask for similar risk from composer Michael Abels, with whom he had collaborated before. Abels, among the sadly few composers of color within the industry, responded to the challenge by writing a score that attempts to speak to every genre explored within the story. The assignment was by far his greatest career test, the narrative requiring more than just typical, stock science fiction and horror music. A fair amount of the film was left without music at all, and a handful of scenes is handled with vintage songs from long ago. The frenetic cue, "The Run (Urban Legends)," was written by Abels for a concert presentation in 2012 and remains a favorite of Peele. The remainder is fresh for Nope, and its stylings are all over the place. The base of the score remains orchestral, with a few synthetic and stereotypical Western accents at times. Much of the disturbing character of the work is accomplished organically, with only occasional post-production embellishments to the mix. A significant portion of this score explores horror dissonance not unfamiliar to Marco Beltrami's career, with each section applied in fairly standard methods of maintaining dread, punctuated by crescendos of shrieking atonality that stress an already anxious album experience.

In Abels' efforts to address so many genre sounds ranging from fantasy to science fiction, Western to horror, he never manages to make the score for Nope truly comfortable in any of them aside from the horror. The first 40 to 50 minutes of the score, when not expressing tepid thematic establishment or Western-themed, source-like outbursts, is a prolonged exercise in suspenseful sustains from strings and jabbing textures from brass. Even when Abels shifts to more dramatic fantasy and action in the final third, he's not able to shake the horror, leaving very few tonally satisfying moments. The human story of the leads in Nope is compelling, but Abels doesn't provide any sincere depth for those characters, either before or after their hardships with the creature and their coming together as siblings. The tone of the score simply never helps you care about anything remotely positive on screen, content only to supply frightful, less-than-totally-frightful, and otherwise mundane moments throughout. The fantasy element is completely nil, a rare choral accompaniment largely wasted late in the score. The wonderment factor here is zero, too. The increasingly fluid and accessible action portions are a bit more engaging, but they too fall flat. Some of these issues are related to an extremely sparse recording quality to this ensemble. The spread of the instruments is so poor in some cues that the presentation may as well be in monoaural sound. The performances themselves also suffer from a lack of enthusiasm, even in the outright Western parody passages, the conducting eliciting very little passion from the group. The final mix is thus functional but devoid of the kind of spirit necessary for the fantastic scope of the tale. Part of the anonymity problem with the score comes from Abels' surprising choice to devalue thematic enunciation, his themes barely registering and therefore mostly pointless. The central family receives the only dramatically inclined theme of the work, but its performances are typically so tepid that you may not even notice the melody while it plays. This character theme peaks through at the outset of "Haywood Ranch" in only two-note fragments but consolidates at 1:09 on woodwinds for the whole theme. It's sensitive on horn and woodwinds in "Brother Sister Walk" and tentative and nervous at 0:14 into "Growing Up Haywood," losing its dramatic reach thereafter. Fragments of the idea are teased throughout "The Unaccounted For" and "Preparing the Trap," but casual listeners may not notice them.

It takes until 0:22 into "Abduction" before the main Haywood theme in Nope fully returns, this time in faux-Jerry Goldsmith action suspense but far sparser in depth. This theme offers light drama in the middle of "A Hero Falls" and turns to solemn brass at 0:23 into "Wishing Well" before shifting to agonized strings at 0:46. On the other side of the emotional spectrum is an appropriately elusive theme for the "Jean Jacket" creature that does better reveal itself by the end of the score, though still not convincingly. This mysterious or menacing series of three note phrases emerges on woodwinds late in "What's a Bad Miracle" and early in "Holy Shit It's Real." Eventually, it vaguely guides the rhythmic crescendo late in "Abduction" before stating its progressions fully in the second half action of "Pursuit" and the closing suspense of "Wishing Well." Abels' insertion of parody Western styling into the score may be an amusing attraction for film score enthusiasts, and it certainly shows the composer's chops in this arena, but it doesn't fit well with the remainder of the work. Even within these three cues, Abels doesn't retain consistent melodic measures. The Western applications start as the source material heard with Elmer Bernstein optimism during all of "Jupiter's Claim," and shades of this material are reprised in "The Star Lasso Expeeerrriii" before a manipulated ending lends comedy to the impending mass death. Abels doesn't return to the melody in this material for his end credits opener, "Nope," but instead devises a new Western theme, which opens that cue and returns at 1:34 and 2:12. Inspired more blatantly by Ennio Morricone, this theme rising from key and then falling with style also features a lengthy interlude sequence. As a standalone Western parody cue, "Nope" is more than proficient, but its presence in the credits sequence makes absolutely no sense after the preceding action. The entirety of Abels' narrative arc for Nope is haphazard and unsatisfactory, leaving the score as one that relies on suspenseful execution from moment to moment to appeal. Sadly, while the horror material may suit the film adequately, it makes for an aggravating listening experience on the long album, which also litters source songs ("Sunglasses at Night" is horrid) and a little dialogue throughout. Don't expect to receive salvation in the fantasy and action portions at the end, for they don't provide the depth or tonality of excitement that this concept could have used. In the end, it's a score focused squarely on discomforting suspense and horror techniques that are merely average in quality. This film deserved a far more compelling and well-coordinated score than it received. Let it get sucked up into the sky.  **

TRACK LISTINGS:

Total Time: 82:39

• 1. Haywood Ranch (2:55) • 2. The Muybridge Clip (3:17) • 3. La Vie C'est Chouette - performed by Jodie Foster (2:44) • 4. Jupiter's Claim (1:43) • 5. Brother Sister Walk (1:18) • 6. Walk On By - performed by Dionne Warwick (2:54) • 7. Growing Up Haywood (1:29) • 8. This is the Lost Generation - performed by The Lost Generation (3:34) • 9. Not Good (2:00) • 10. What's a Bad Miracle (1:32) • 11. The Oprah Shot (1:51) • 12. Ancient Aliens (2:08) • 13. Park Kids Prank Haywood (1:08) • 14. It's in the Cloud (2:37) • 15. Holy Shit It's Real (2:09) • 16. Progressive Anxiety (3:02) • 17. The Star Lasso Expeeerrriii (0:35) • 18. Arena Attack (1:23) • 19. Sunglasses at Night - Jean Jacket Mix - performed by Corey Hart (4:38) • 20. Blood Rain (1:47) • 21. The Unaccounted For (2:36) • 22. Preparing the Trap (2:41) • 23. Purple People Reader - performed by Michael Wincott (1:35) • 24. Exuma, The Obeah Man - performed by Exuma (6:12) • 25. Man Down (6:02) • 26. WTF is That (1:13) • 27. The Run (Urban Legends) (1:42) • 28. Abduction (1:58) • 29. Havoc (0:46) • 30. Em & Angel Fly (2:20) • 31. A Hero Falls (2:47) • 32. Pursuit (1:49) • 33. Wishing Well (3:42) • 34. Nope (2:31)

NOTES & QUOTES:

There exists no official packaging for this album.

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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 Nope are Copyright © 2022, Back Lot Music and cannot be redistributed without the label's expressed written consent. Page created 8/7/22 (and not updated significantly since).