There're people who like to play soundtracks without ever having seen the works the soundtracks accompany. And I suppose I've been in that group at some point, what with having driven around Washington, D.C. as a young man with an import cassette of Merry Christmas, Mr. Lawrence by Ryuichi Sakamoto blaring out of my car stereo. And while I eventually came to love that film, I think I loved the score -- and the imagined work it scored in my head first -- more.
That's a roundabout way of introducing a soundtrack from Beauty Pill that's finally seeing the light of day nearly a decade after its first use. suicide.chat.room was a 2010 play directed by Marcus Kyd, but it's the score by Chad Clark and Beauty Pill that we're talking about today. The resulting album, Sorry You're Here, up on Bandcamp now, is equal parts elegiac and as light as a feather, Clark revealing once again why he's one of the best composers working in D.C., if not America, at the moment.
Opener "So Dark Blinking Makes No Difference" is pure Sakamoto, chords skipping across the water of the mind, while "At A Loss" prefigures the sort of instrumentation that eventually ended up on Describes Things As They Are in 2015. And for the passages here on Sorry You're Here where the music really does function as a soundtrack, albeit one for a work largely inaccessible for anyone in 2019, there are loads more that see Clark taking genuine risks. "Isn't There Something Within You?", for instance, uses cut-up samples from a Kirk Cameron born again-website to make an audio collage that's equal parts Eighties-era Bill Nelson and Nineties Aphex Twin. It is, like some of those more well-known Beauty Pill songs, disconcerting and oddly funny, full of the kind of humor of someone -- like Chad Clark himself -- who's come near death and back again.
And, in a brilliant mix of musical risk-taking and thematic service, "JTS Study no. 1" sees Beauty Pill and Chad Clark take David Bowie's "Jump They Say" single -- itself about the suicide of Bowie's half-brother -- and re-work it into something else entirely. This is elegant, ghostly music that, if not so firmly rooted in the realities of the suicide.chat.room play and subject matter, one might even shove into a category somewhere between goth and chamber pop. The cut is intellectually impressive and emotionally engaging, just like the best more recent tracks from Beauty Pill.
What's here on Sorry You're Here feels less like a soundtrack and more like the start of a Beauty Pill record. Less fussy than some numbers from the band, selections here on this score spool out into the void with an easy grace. And for every cut here that is beautiful, like the faintly Nyman-like "Valuable Experience no. 2", there are others here that are just busy enough to sustain repeated listens, while being sparse enough to allow multiple interpretations from a listener. And what higher praise could I give any soundtrack than that?
Sorry You're Here is out now via the link below.
More details on Beauty Pill via the band's official website, or their official Facebook page.
[Photo: Beauty Pill, Washington, D.C., 2017, by Glenn Griffith]