Adam Lastiwka

Atlantic Screen/Filmtrax

Scoring an unusual vampire tale…

This is actually the shortest soundtrack album around these parts for years… It only runs about twenty five minutes, despite covering SyFy’s 10-episode surprise hit comedy, Reginald The Vampire.

Composer Adam Lastiwka has been building up a resume of zero-budget TV movies like Doomsday Mom over the past few years, before getting a bigger break on Family Law. He has, however, a lot of musical experience helping out on bigger shows and movies, assisting bigger-name composers with additional cues and the like under a general “music department” kind of IMDB heading. That experience includes the likes of movies like The Nice Guys and Pompeii, and shows like The Expanse.

With this kind of modern pedigree, it’s unsurprising that he takes this SyFy series score the synth and electronica route, whether because of stylistic preference or low budget for musicians.

The album opens with “Already Broken,” which has the feel of a John Carpenter-style base with a youthful Stranger Things tripping along on top, curving nicely between cheery lightness and a warning of darkness. It then switches completely around with “Love Theme Part 1,” which brings a more ethereal feel but grounded in a reality of a physical acoustic guitar. The next thing you know, the third track, “I’m A Puzzle” proves to be telling no lies and it throws all kinds of wondrous unusual ethnic instruments at us in a dazzling third consecutive style.

As stated already, this is a really short album – there are only ten tracks, the longest (“bloodsugasexmagik”) running two minutes fifty-five of full-on action chase that feels like being chased by a Terminator, and the shortest (“Reginald The Vampire Theme”) a mere twenty seconds. Despite its brevity, however it somehow manages to pack in a remarkably wide range of moods and sensations.

The guitar returns in “First Kiss” and “Love Theme Part 2.” while “Myogoblin” gives us the sound of traditional screen score strings, before twisting in the last third to a hilariously bouncy and cartoonish moment of unbridled fun.

The only disappointing track, really, is “Vampirewave,” which is just a typical rolling jumble of noise that you’d expect from any actiony horror score; it does its job, but doesn’t have the range or heights of the rest of it. Like the rest of the album, though, it’s brief and quickly over.

Verdict: Small but almost perfectly formed, though your mileage may vary on the matter of its listening minutes-per-penny rate. 9/10

David A McIntee