In 2010, the French electronic music duo Daft Punk teamed up with composer and arranger Joseph Trapanese to score a flashy but hollow reboot of the classic sci-fi movie Tron. As fuel for an action flick, it was an efficient piece of work. A full orchestra and expensive synthetic tones provided the requisite sweep and height; the expected bombast and wonder. But it was hardly recognizable as music by Daft Punk, which was odd because their usual aesthetic would have been such a dynamic fit for the movie's neon world. The dance music auteurs all but vanished behind a deluxe sheen, into the idioms of Hans Zimmer and John Williams. Three years later, the scenario is playing out again with eerie accuracy: Ryan Dombal's review of the Tron: Legacy OST would perfectly fit M83's Oblivion OST with the replacement of a couple proper nouns.
Like Tron: Legacy, Oblivion is a sci-fi extravaganza, directed by Joseph Kosinski, where awesome visual spectacles are staged around a wispy emotional core. Once again, an acclaimed French electronic act pairs with Trapanese and forsakes its artistic identity to satisfy the generic musical conventions of summer blockbusters. Trapanese's orchestration and M83's poppy electronic shoegaze blended well on Hurry Up, We’re Dreaming, the breakthrough album that opened the door for Anthony Gonzalez to make literally rather than figuratively "cinematic" music in the mainstream. The tradeoff is that Gonzalez by necessity adapts to Trapanese, the professional here, so thoroughly that it was startling to see M83 in the credits. That churning electronic fingerprint, reportedly deemed "too indie" for a Tom Cruise vehicle, is smeared out to an absurd degree. Why hire Gonzalez at all if you don't want raw indie eagerness?
Gonzalez is a masterful stylist, but an average composer at best, which makes the subtraction of his style rather fatal for the Oblivion OST as a standalone experience. The music is more unmemorable than bad, though occasionally Gonzalez's inexperience, which seems to limit what Trapanese can do as well, shows: "Tech 49" cheats its way from tense pulse to driving resolution with desultory orchestral passages, while "Odyssey Rescue" spatters an erratic path through ambiguously related parts, making us keenly aware of the missing onscreen action that would make sense of it. There are brighter spots: If you took "Waking Up" and changed the pounding timpani to synthetic toms, the string section to keyboards and arpeggiators, then you would have a generic but recognizable M83 song on your hands. And Gonzalez's signature arc, where arrangements seem to accelerate through space and then burst into flames upon atmospheric reentry, is evident in "StarWaves". But you have to listen pretty hard to hear the ghostly remains of his hand in these backdrops for chase scenes and dream sequences.
Gonzalez does get one pure M83 moment on the title track, which is taut and effervescent with heartfelt vocals from Susanne Sundfør. More like it would have made for a better album that clashed terribly with the cold, inhuman film to which it was attached. It would be foolish to conflate one instance of creative compromise with M83 being compromised in principle. Artists needn't be slaves to their own visions all the time, and there's nothing wrong with working a job for pay. The only real problem with the Oblivion OST is that it was released as M83, which isn't a neutral funnel for Gonzalez's musical craftsmanship. It's a very specific set of promises that go badly unfulfilled. Gonzalez knows this, telling Pitchfork that he would have preferred to release it as "Anthony Gonzalez and Joe Trapanese." Universal, more interested in the brand than the man, disagreed. The people who buy action-movie OSTs-- whomever they are-- should be satisfied. But to M83 fans, this will just be a cautionary tale about an indie auteur turning his back on little machines he can control and getting mauled by a huge one-- Hollywood focus groups-- which he can't.
