By Jeff Russo

Lakeshore Records, out now

Jeff Russo serves up another slice of discordant, unsettling disharmonies as he musical accompaniment to Fox’s oddest superhero series.

The second season of Legion was somewhat of an ordeal – parts of it were close to the heights of the first season, others were confusing and some were just plain bad. It’s rather fitting then, that this soundtrack album can be said to be a fairly accurate mirror of its parent show.

There’s an experimental quality to Russo’s work that recalls the oddities of Pink Floyd’s Dark Side of the Moon, while grabbing liberally from wider cinema for influences. Many Days (Synth) for example, spends most of its lengthy 12 minute 47 second runtime feeling like an attempt at a grungier, edgier version of some of Vangelis’ work for Blade Runner, but unfortunately instead of setting an evocative mood simply batters the ears with discordant noise, underlapping occasional snatches of voice and overlapping crashing and banging leaving the listener on edge.

Similarly, there’s a very Zimmer/Nolan-esque vibe to those long, crashing notes that permeate so many of the tracks here which stirs memories of The Dark Knight and Inception, punctuated by high, screechy notes on strings and weird beats.

After delivering its initial five tracks, which between them account for over half the run time, the album has a run of mini cues of between a minute and two minutes long, none of which are all that remarkable, before coming back with 89 Days, a genuinely melodic, if moody piece, and signing out with a trio of smaller tracks concluding with the full version of the end titles, itself the best track by far on the album.

It’s not what I’d call a pleasure to listen to – like the show itself, the music seems intentionally designed to make the listener feel off-balance, and much like the second season of Legion itself, what was experimental and challenging before often feels instead chaotic and disorganised, as if Russo is trying to replicate something much better and simply never quite nailing it. I finished listening to it feeling exhausted and with a small headache threatening at the back of my head, and the oddest thing is that I honestly can’t say for sure how much of that is down to Russo’s intent and how much is just an unhappy accident of the choices he made.

Verdict: Discordant, derivative and actual hard work to listen to. It’s hard to recommend this to anyone but devoted fans of the show, and I’m fairly confident that one listen will be more than enough even for most of them. 3/10

Greg D. Smith