The fictional Mega-City One is the ultimate impure vision of the future. Apartment blocks shoot toward the heavens, spilling over with bored and persecuted citizens. Unemployment rates are high. The crime rate is even higher. Forget about buying coffee-- it's been outlawed as an illegal stimulant. Patrolling the streets are a series of fascistic Judges, employed to keep the peace by any means necessary. It makes the Blade Runner universe look like Disneyland. At least, that's how the makers of popular Brit comic 2000 AD imagine it, as told through the eyes of their most famous character, the granite-jawed Judge Dredd. Portishead's Geoff Barrow was a kid who, like me, grew up devouring this world, buying 2000 AD week after week to see which perp was going to end up on the business end of Dredd's lawgiver. DROKK is Barrow's tribute to Mega-City One, coming out of a series of sessions with Emmy-nominated composer Ben Salisbury.
Dredd is the kind of character who continues to leave a vivid imprint on the minds of successive generations of comic book fans, but he's been remarkably ill-served when removed from the confines of 2000 AD. The Fink Brothers' musical tribute to Mega-City One, and Sylvester Stallone's hacky 1995 interpretation of Dredd, are best forgotten. Despite this, hopes for Pete Travis' forthcoming big-budget adaptation, simply titled Dredd, are reasonably high. Even Barrow, who began this project with Salisbury to provide the soundtrack to Travis' film, only to find their work left on the cutting room floor, said he thought the feature was going to be "fucking brilliant." But Dredd will feel less foreboding without their music. Armed with three vintage Oberheim two-voice synths, the pair reaches into the grubby, blackened heart of Mega-City One, via a soundtrack flooded with the kind of trepidation that classic 2000 AD artists like Brian Bolland so often conjured up.
DROKK reveals Barrow's comic book fandom, but it also highlights his taste in soundtracks. There's no escaping the specter of John Carpenter hanging over these tracks, especially his drone-heavy Assault on Precinct 13 score. But there's a relentless darkness at work here that even Carpenter might shy away from dipping into. The Escape From New York theme had a sanguine beauty to it, but Barrow and Salisbury lock into an obdurate form of austerity early on ("Lawmaster/Pursuit", "Helmet Theme") and never let the tension drop. Mostly, the atmosphere is meat-locker cold ("Scope the Block", "Clone Gunman"), and while it never reaches the extremities of Whitehouse or Throbbing Gristle, it bears a similar kind of ornery undertow. Occasionally they work in pure drones, adding a portentous type of beauty to tracks like "Exhale" and "Iso Hymn", making it feel like all the air just got sucked out of the room.
Elsewhere, it's not hard to hear traces of Vangelis' soundtrack to Blade Runner and the work Tangerine Dream carried out for Kathryn Bigelow's Near Dark. Like those albums, the music on DROKK provides a definite sense of journey, a feeling that we're being tangled up in plot twists that unravel, conclude, and maybe leave a few questions open at the end. Soundtracks that work well often create a strong sense of narrative when isolated from the visuals they're representing, and DROKK functions in much the same manner. It's even easy to picture the credits scrolling over "End Theme". Sadly, we'll never see Dredd gliding through the city on his Lawmaster while the pummeling "Titan Bound" echoes through a multiplex. But maybe it's better that way. Instead, this album provides Dredd fans with a chance to fix this music to their own favorite stories, giving the unrelenting decay and despair of Mega-City One the ferociously solemn musical backdrop it's always deserved.
