“Probably Commodore 64 users”
A review of the Tron: Legacy soundtrack, originally written for the Sunday Herald in December 2010. I never know from one week to the next whether these things will be published on the HeraldScotland website or not; I figure I might as well start posting them up here too.
Daft Punk: Tron: Legacy (Disney)
LET’S be honest: Tron was a rubbish film. Pioneering, certainly — a special-effects tour de force by the dark-age standards of 1982 — but almost inhumanly tedious with it. Watching Jeff Bridges boring his way around a big blue grid, or finding exciting ways to get the family’s shiny new ZX Spectrum to print “SIMON IS ACE”? No contest.
Of course, not everyone saw it that way. Despite its dullness, Tron gained a kind of cult status — probably among Commodore 64 users — and it’s surprising it’s taken 28 years before some panicking Hollywood executive saw the value in a festive family sequel. But while I’m finding it remarkably easy to contain my excitement about Tron: Legacy the movie, the soundtrack is a little more interesting.
Like Tron, French duo Daft Punk have never struck me as deserving of the praise they get. While their repetitive robo-electro is broadly effective, it can also feel contrived (and occasionally downright lazy). So a commission like this could be the chance for them to show some emotion; to prove to us they’re human after all; to try something a little harder, better … oh, look, you know where I’m going with this.
Initial signs weren’t good. The first thing Daft Punk did was draft in an orchestra, announcing that they couldn’t possibly do a film soundtrack with two synthesisers and a drum machine. But why not? They’re part of a long line of pioneers who’ve proved you don’t need “real” instruments to connect (even if this pair always seemed wired for the feet rather than the heart). Who says every Hollywood soundtrack has to feature the ersatz emotion of predictable strings? Didn’t Daft Punk listen to Wendy Carlos’s score for the original film: the one she said was pretty much ruined by Disney’s insistence on hiring the London Philharmonic? (Actually, let’s hope not, for their sake.)
Either way, Tron: Legacy suffers because of this. There’s a lot of frankly unnecessary swelling and parping and portentous rumbling here: the same old sound of hired musicians dutifully doing their job. By far the most compelling moments are when the electronics come to the fore: when the synth scythes into life two minutes into Disc Wars, or when The Son Of Flynn unfolds shyly into a small symphony of sequences, or the entirety of End Of Line and Derezzed, icy pieces of death-disco that do what so many of today’s pale imitators fail to achieve, staying true to the electronic spirit of the early eighties while still sounding perfectly contemporary.
And ultimately, among 22 tracks, there’s just enough of this — just enough brilliance amid the bombast — to make Tron: Legacy worthwhile. If you’ve got a taste for saccharine superfluity, you’ll no doubt love the rest of it too. Me: I’ll hold out for the next Daft Punk album proper, albeit with substantially higher hopes.
