You get the sense that we’re deep within English producer Mathew Herbert’s golden period, a frenzied, ambitious highly creative period where he’ now afforded the luxury of tangenting in various directions. This collection virtually screams it, there’ none of the rickety house beats and sharp jerky fragments of sound that we’ve come to expect from him, there’ no wailing chanteuse, or warm pulsing heartbeats, in fact it all sounds decidedly un-electronic. A collection of his scores for film and dance from 1997 – 2007, it’s quite varied yet seems to highlight his love of ‘big band’ orchestration. Of course, in 2003, he offered Goodbye Swingtime which flirted with a Disney at the Hollywood Bowl approach, yet his four pieces for French director Bianca Li’ Le Defi, including a delightfully bouncy brass heavy cover of ‘Singing in the Rain’ pushes this tendency to the fore. With sweeping strings, grooving bass lines and punchy brass it touches upon and demonstrates his deep appreciation of late ’50s Hollywood composers, your Bernard Hermanns, Gil Evans, Max Steiners. Many of the pieces here are more immediate and less experimental than the work he is best known for and as a result it would be interesting to know his brief with each piece or the impact, degree of intervention or constraints placed upon his work by his various collaborators. That said you get the feeling that Herbert has treated each score as an adventure, an opportunity to follow up on vague tangents and attempt to pay homage and do something that he has never done before. There is still some quite experimental work here, yet like all of Herbert’s work, the palette is incredibly seductive, lush chorals, tinkery piano and atmospheres on a dance piece called ‘Rendezvous’, and that’s the most avant garde moment on here. Most of the pieces here are for reasonably obscure Italian, Spanish and French productions, and there is scant information from Herbert about his intentions. That said this is incredibly accomplished music in a myriad of styles that stands up by itself, making you wonder how the films possibly could.
Bob Baker Fish
