Album Reviews

Ridley Scott's 1982 "future noir" classic "Bladerunner" based on Philip K.Dick's "Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep" was a box-office flop when first released. Like "TRON", another flop, it has gained stature over the years, though like "TRON", the movie's visual and sonic pleasures are greater than the storytelling.

The soundtrack by Vangelis was as sonically memorable as were the visuals of a dysfunctional 2019 Los Angeles.

Harrison Ford plays a dispirited "Blade Runner", whose job it was to hunt down and dispose of organic robots difficult to distinguish from humans, who were created to do grunt work on outer space colonies, but who find a way to return to earth where, to survive, they attempt to blend into the human population.

Ford's character agrees to one more assignment and adventure turns into a dangerous but melancholic and confusing exercise.

Vangelis's synthesizer soundtrack moves appropriately from bombast to heartbreak, while mostly remaining cool (if not icy) and detached. Side two adds Middle Eastern and Pakistani Qawwali music to the mix. The combination of synth, pulsing drums and world music set the tone for many soundtracks to come and influenced generations of film composers from "Terminator 2"'s Brad Fiedel to much of Hans Zimmer's output, including "Gladiator."

On one track, "Memories of Green," Vangelis sounds to have been influenced by Brian Eno's stark mid 1970s work, but his inner Yanni shows and it gets a bit florid. The end credits' "harp" glissandos and other musical accents sound a bit hokey and dated to 2013 ears, but overall this soundtrack's creativity and innovation hold up remarkably well 30+ years later.

Back in 1982 sonics we take for granted now were stark, cold, other-worldy and could be alienating. Vangelis managed to produce a track that was both cold and yet emotionally involving, thanks to the vocals and particularly an evocative saxophone part that represented Harrison Ford's character's dismay as he began falling for one of the robots he was assigned to de-commission, and having unexpected sympathy for the plight of the band of robots. A synthesized harmonica handles the rest of the melancholy.

For one reason or another, this music was not released as a music soundtrack until 1994. This Audio Fidelity issue on 180g is its first vinyl issue and from Vangelis's comments in the gatefold packaging written in 1994, some of the material was not in the film, though it was composed for it.

Surely Kevin Gray cut this from a digital source, though the source is not identified on the record or in the press release.

However, this is almost all from synthesizers so who cares?

The soundtrack includes some dialogue mixed into the music plus a few songs including an unrecognizable Mary Hopkin singing "Rachel's Song," and "One More Kiss, Dear", a crooned (by Don Percival) retro-forties number a la "We'll Meet Again" that you might know from The Byrds' version, but which was a WW II anthem. It ends side one. The lyricist, Peter Skellern had a modest hit remaking Irving Berlin's "Puttin' On the Ritz" so he probably had a "thing" for this kind of music.

Side two combines moody atmospherics, synth bombast and synth bass that will shake your room if your system goes very low. Dynamics are wide, soundstages, expansive and deep. In other words, whatever the source, this is a sonic spectacular.

For fans of the movie, this kind of soundtrack listened to in the dark can effectively conjure up movie scenes and produce other-worldly "theater of the mind" images. For everyone else, it's just a more abstract kind of emotional evocation.