It’s highly unusual for a horror movie to attract the kind of critical acclaim that Sinners has, but then again Ryan Coogler’s film is a highly unusual one. He frames an obvious From Dusk Till Dawn-inspired plot around the story of black music in America in an impressive way, focusing in particular on the blues and southern rock but in one wonderful scene bringing it all the way up to the present.
As such, music is at the very heart of the film. It was all put together by Ludwig Göransson – while Sweden is perhaps not renowned for its blues music, the composer grew up with it thanks to the influence of his father and clearly revelled in this experience, supervising new arrangements of some great songs of the past, some brand new ones, and of course providing the original score.
The score has to dance around the songs within the movie to some extent and I suspect it would be one of those cases where as a listening experience it would be better-served by playing a similar role on the album, but instead there are separate song and score soundtracks and so there’s no option but to judge it on its own terms.
There are two key points here really – there’s a set of blues instrumentals which are really tremendously well done, bolstered no end by some fantastic performances from brilliant musicians – guitars and all sorts of variants on them, harmonica, Jew’s harp, various vocals – it’s a melange of great ingredients and if you enjoy that sort of music then it’s hard to find fault.
On the other hand the attraction of those pieces is they have a vibrancy to them and are very colourful, indeed very soulful, and clearly there are all sorts of stories which can be conjured up in the head from listening to them – but they do not function as dramatic underscore in a movie usually functions, which means on the album that ingredient that probably draws a lot of us towards good film music on albums, which is the dramatic pull, the emotional flow – that’s not really there. This is a fairly nuanced point – I’m not suggesting that the music doesn’t function as a film score because it absolutely does – rather that it’s conceived with a different purpose, arguably a higher purpose.
There are two other ingredients to the music – when the vampires arrive at the twin brothers’ (both played brilliantly by Michael B. Jordan) new juke joint, attracted by all this wonderful music, they are led by an Irish one which means at times Göransson gets to add celtic flavours to his musical mix – and he integrates this really very impressively. At times though the music does become a bit more of a straight underscore where the composer uses more typical horror movie techniques: these sequences are considerably more basic than everything else, even when the rock presence is still felt, and the schlock can feel quite cheap in comparison. Be warned too that at times it does stray into quite dissonant territory which can make for a difficult listen – that’s the whole point of course, but some of the more aggressive electronica is quite heavy on my old ears.
The totality of Göransson’s contribution to Sinners is certainly impressive and as such it’s no real surprise that he’s looking like he’s going to take home a clean sweep of all the major film music awards, but I do keep coming back to my thought that the real action is on the song album and for all its moments of undoubted brilliance, not least from the fantastic spirit provided by the musicians, the score album feels a bit disjointed and like listening to what happens in between the best stuff. Those moments of brilliance are here though, and there’s a lot more good than bad.
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