Since Chromatics failed to release Dear Tommy on Valentine’s Day of 2014, the long-awaited follow up from Johnny Jewel and co. has become an elusive white whale for a particular fan of tastefully sleazy electronic music. It’s a genre that finds the sun slowly setting upon itself, and with every passing day, the audience for Jewel’s ribald mutant synth-pop gets older. Each hint that has emerged in the last two years—in the form of four songs all released without warning—has been tantalizing, yet tinged with bittersweet nostalgia. Two new videos have arrived since this summer alone, but Dear Tommy remains an enigma.
The release of Jewel’s latest film score, for Belgian director Fien Troch’s nihilist coming-of-age tale, Home, now feels overshadowed by the media cycle and speculation that Dear Tommy has produced by virtue of its absence. Nonetheless, filmmakers have recently seemed to swarm Jewel. The attention has come in the wake of 2012’s Chromatics LP Kill for Love and the larger profile it has helped Jewel cultivate, as well as his mostly-scrapped 2011 soundtrack to Nicolas Winding Refn’s Drive, which still managed to contain Jewel’s spectral presence.
On the whole, though, Jewel’s film music has been hit or miss. In 2012, Themes For an Imaginary Film (his unused Drive music) was an engrossing and steamy soundscape. His 2015 Lost River soundtrack, meanwhile, was an overly luxuriant accessory to an otherwise comically bad film. This score for Home, by comparison, is strangely mild-mannered.
Due to its minimal distribution, U.S. audiences are not likely to see Torch’s film. In a way (and not unlike Jewel’s other filmic projects) this 41-minute, 14-track score stands alone as a musical experience, a whisper of new music from Jewel’s multiple projects, though a portion of it recycles old songs. Two of the Chromatics tracks, “Paradise” and “Running from the Sun,” originally appeared on Kill for Love. The former was lightly edited into a more dance oriented version, and the latter seems completely unchanged. Of the new music you do get: there is one new Chromatics song, three Symmetry songs, and eight ambient tracks credited to Jewel. These three different sides of Jewel are only diffusely connected. It creates a disjointed listen, as if two experiences are stacked on top of each other rather than organized for flow or logic.
“Magazine,” the sole new Chromatics track, is disappointingly one of their least interesting songs in a very long time. It lacks any of the sordid thrill, the noir funk, and essential sense of foreboding of their past releases. “Magazine” is surprisingly beige as far as Italo-disco goes. Even if the song unmistakably owns Chromatics’ sonic identity—slithering drum machine, glacial synths, greasy guitars—it comes off as hollow or caricatured. This is magnified in the film, where it is used early on to set the scene for groups of disaffected teenagers hanging out near a high school, making out, staring into the abyss of their iPhone screens.
The Symmetry songs are all instrumental genre exercises, with a slightly more focused mood. “The Alligator” is Jewel’s take on trap or EDM, and sounds like what Mike WiLL Made-It might produce if all he listened to was Giorgio Moroder. “The Magician” is perfectly melodramatic rave music, and “Countdown” is classic opiated fare from Jewel. Once the door closes on the Chromatics/Symmetry side of the soundtrack, and Jewel’s solo work takes over, the album suddenly swerves into agreeable and bland territory.
Jewel’s eight ambient works are mostly forgettable. They are all tightly constructed, brooding, atmospheric—the kind of music that is popular and ubiquitous for indie dramas of all stripes and colors. In that way, these utilitarian songs perfectly accomplish what they are supposed to do in the film: compliment, render, and foreground narrative. But any expectation of the shock of the new immediately fails to be met. That is not to say there aren’t highlights from this cluster of songs. “Remorse,” the best of these, is four minutes of gothic drums and gaseous hisses that that recall Ben Frost. Other moments, like “Trust,” favorably recall Stars of the Lid. Overall, the situation that this soundtrack generates is similar to the disappointment you might feel after opening up a pack of baseball cards. As you flip through the haul, there is the potential for something rare to pop up, but more likely than not, you’ll have seen it all before.
