By Let’s Eat Grandma

Netflix

An unusual score for an unusual show…

The score for this eight-episode Netflix series produced by Andy Serkis is supplied by the Norwich-based duo of Rosa Walton and Jenny Hollingworth, aka Let’s Eat Grandma. Their style is an experimental Art-Pop Avant-Pop kind of mix, which makes for a distinctive sound wandering between their own vocal choral orchestrations, environmental atmosphere for a mechanistic and electronic world, and bizarre yet compelling noise distortion.

Even from the opening theme, “Half Bad” (the title of the YA novel the series is based on), all those elements are present, starting with echoing metallic pot sounds that then tilt vertiginously in and out of discordance and provide a counterpoint to their ethereal vocals.

Soon, “Mouse Feet” brings a sort of retro-futurism that nails the modern city and is a conceptual opposite to Stranger Things’s nostalgia-synth sound, while “Money Spiders” has a delightful light collar-bell element to it, and “Don’t Pull The Knife Out, It’ll Only Bleed More” brings us back a more traditional synth organ style. This blend of sounds, with natural ambient sounds like showers and dryers blending in, continues through the album, with the sweeter chorals returning for the likes of “Half Bad 2”. “Trapped In A Washing Machine” really sounds like being inside some kind of machine, and yet it works musically too, which is a good achievement.

The romantic themes are the ones that tend to come back into more traditional synth score territory, which is nothing bad, but feels less experimental than other parts, and, being a Netflix show, makes you wonder if this was an instruction to try to recapture their Stranger Things air. On the other hand, we’ve had such tones and style of synth romance at least since Vangelis’s score for Blade Runner so it’s not as if it isn’t a straightforward expected industry standard, and these are pleasant tracks to listen to, just ones that feel a little more consciously safer, so to speak.

Unusualness returns, however, with the two “Rhythmic Creatures” tracks, which start with rising and falling oddness before bringing in water droplets, bells, and layering themselves into a fascinating and enjoyable theme to let the imagination fill in whatever creatures the listener could imagine. Truly discordant and disturbing is “Mercury’s Theme” too, though the tracks around it a more a mix of emotionally evocative and dramatic stylings. The vocal chorus goes very dark and different for “Funeral” but also makes for a a good “End Credits” before morphing into a thrashy early 90s style finale.

Verdict: It’s a relatively unusual type of soundtrack album, with a more experimental and artistically avant-garde musical journey through it, and some of the sounds are so unmusical that they shouldn’t even work in music… yet they do, and very well too. Other bits are more the kind of thing you’d expect from a 1980s or 90s synth-based soundtrack, but there’s more than enough new and different here to make it interesting, and there is that nostalgia value to be had too. If you’re a fan of synth, or experimental-Pop, you’ll probably have grabbed it for the artists anyway. If you’re a more general soundtrack music fan… there are bits you’ll grimace at, but plenty to be surprised by in a pleasant way too.

Experimental, of course, being worth experimenting with. 9/10

David A McIntee