Bryce Dessner is, if only to those attuned to the new-classical world, no longer just a rock’n’roll tourist in the world of major orchestral commissions. For the past five or so years, Dessner has premiered a few major works every year and demonstrated a breadth of musical vision that goes well beyond the expected post-minimalist gambits of the “crossover classical” composer. To the art-music world, a Deutsche Grammaphon recording of a multi-movement orchestral suite might have signalled that Dessner meant business. To a larger chunk of music fans, it might have been his involvement with the Ryuichi Sakamoto-helmed soundtrack for Oscar shoe-in The Revenant* *that singled that this classical stuff wasn’t just a dalliance.
In collaboration with his brother and bandmate Aaron, Bryce has now created intimate and modest music for an even more intimate and modest movie. There are similarities between Transpecos and The Revenant: like Alejandro Iñárritu’s unsparing epic, director Greg Kwedar’s feature film debut—a tale of three border patrol agents in Texas whose lives are derailed forever by the illicit contents in the trunk of car—traces a few men’s battle against cruel fate and crueller nature. A festival favorite this year and another among the ever-widening ranks of straight-to-VOD critically lauded indie films, Transpecos is a testament to what a filmmaker can do with the bare minimum in terms of set pieces, climactic action, and performance forces.
The Dessner brothers, in turn, limit their resources as well. Their interplay on the soundtrack (released by indie soundtrack label Milan Records) often resembles their dynamic in the National: an effects-laden rhythm-and-lead relationship, often between a precisely fingerpicked acoustic and sighing, slightly blurry electric guitar figures. It’s much less intricate than Bryce’s recent work, but the musical vocabulary and emotional scope is just as diverse. It’s also a big step forward from the brothers’ themes for the 2013 Kerouac adaptation of *Big Sur. *Chord-organ synth surges and controlled feedback overwhelm the muted guitar rhythms, lending colossal weight to Kwedar’s wide shots of endless desert.
At moments, the Dessners’ response to the source text is a bit knee-jerky. The tracks are heavy on guitar effects (whammy bars, heavy tremolo, weeping slide guitar figures) that conjure a distinctly Western patois (look no further than the track “Cowboys”). But then again, this is a genre film that asks for such things, a Border *noir. *These are semi-winking diversions along the way, not the lifeblood of the soundscape.
Like the film, the soundtrack slows and softens in the third act, becoming all pointillistic guitar, violin notes, and gritty, seething ambience. Hints of folksiness and pop harmony disappear as the three officers accept their grim lot and contemplate the eternal. The spare music mirrors their desolation—sometimes the ruthless phantoms they are hobbling frantically away from, sometimes a vain twinge of hope. Moments like these show that the Dessners as a composing/performing unit have built their reputation not only from developing melodic and rhythmic interchanges, but for finding unexpected ways to shade them.
Though they make for the most interesting cues in the film, these more glacial compositions (the lengthy “Chase” and “Man Down,” in particular) don’t work as well apart from the images, as many are choreographed fairly specifically to beats in the script. But they pay tribute to the Dessners’ real gift as programmatic composers: their ability to play both to and against the dramatic moment when the time feels right. The true power of this music can only be fully felt in context, but that is, after all, what it was designed for. The Dessners understand their relatively slight role. In the context of ethereal modern film scores, they create something both familiar and, in its deployment, unexpected.
