Yann Tiersen doesn’t make music exclusively for films, but his sound is so visual and highly dramatic that you would be forgiven for misconstruing his body of work as one big soundtrack. His résumé galvanizes the impression: Tiersen’s earliest albums drew heavily from screen and stage, his debut even based on Tod Browning’s 1932 weirdo classic, Freaks. The title track of his next album wound up on the The Dreamlife of Angels soundtrack, while another song appeared in the Juliette Binoche film Alice et Martin. And, of course, there’s the whimsical French film Amélie, wherein director Jean-Pierre Jeunet culled music from Tiersen’s first three albums and put it before millions. “The hard part was making a selection,” Jeunet said around the time the movie was released, “because all Tiersen’s tracks worked with the film’s images.”
Following the austere piano and field recordings of 2016’s EUSA, the swooping gestures of ALL might again lead you to imagining crane shots and heart-stirring montages. For the album, Tiersen not only played every instrument but also traveled to far-flung locales to capture very specific field recordings, including booking a transatlantic flight so as to return to the spot along California’s Lost Coast where a mountain lion once chased him. He recorded a violin part there. If that sounds precious, that has been Tiersen’s method since the start. Gorgeous and overstuffed, ALL features Tiersen’s tearjerker melodies and his tendency to crowd them from all sides.
A lovely piano line introduces “Tempelhof,” followed in the background by kids at play. The piece takes field recordings from Berlin’s shuttered airport, which now houses the country’s largest refugee shelter; these displaced children still able to play makes for a bittersweet sound. If you needed to score a scene where a parent looks from a window and gazes at their growing child, this would be catnip. But midway through the piece, Tiersen adds all sorts of curlicues, from fuzz guitar and gongs to birds and weird radio frequencies, elements that dampen the song’s wistful impact. Tiersen often veers toward overstatement, as when synth squiggles, drones, harmonized vocals, jaw harp, nylon guitar, zither, baby cries, bird calls, electronic effects, strings, and finally a choir dogpile the otherwise elegant interplay between piano and shortwave radio on “Pell.”
In addition to this panoply of instruments, Tiersen uses lots of vocalists singing in Swedish, Faroese, and Tiersen’s native Breton. The voices suggest solemn hymnals, even when the lyrics are to be felt rather than understood, as on the stirring climax of “Koad.” They sing, somewhat nonsensically, “Where is the life now? The truth in pieces… How can we live like this?” Likewise, why does Tiersen need a full choir to count in the background of “Bloavezhioù” as church bells clang?
Through nature-based song titles and instruments mixed with field recordings, ALL conveys an overarching theme of environmentalism and humanity’s place in the wilderness. When “Beure Kentañ” gives way to nearly three minutes of bird sounds, for instance, it’s as lovely as what you’d encounter on a hike. But then there’s “Usal Road,” the one where Tiersen hauled his recording rig to the site of the mountain lion encounter; such indulgence obliterates the music’s solemnity.
ALL’s loveliest moment comes on “Heol,” where whispered lyrics in Breton tell a parable about a locked castle and “the golden key of language” that opens it. With each new sound, from twanging guitar and orotund choir to brass fanfare and dizzying strings, Tiersen builds tension, rising toward a peak wrapped with light. It feels positively uplifting—and also destined for an e-commerce commercial preaching connectivity.
