Cul de Sac - The Strangler's Wife (Soundtrack)
(Strange Attractors)
The soundtrack for Roger Corman's The Strangler's Wife was recorded in the middle of the sessions which yielded Cul de Sac's masterpiece, Death of the Sun. Coming hot off the heels of that album, The Strangler's Wife continues the band's musical momentum, though uses little of the thickly layered and delicately emotional washes that made Death of the Sun such a beautifully realized album.
Having not seen the movie, I am left to listen to this album on its own, rather than as a part of the complete statement it was intended to be a part of. More often than not hearing a soundtrack apart from its film or production exposes the songs as half formed. Or, to put it differently, because the musicians are recording the songs to augment images they often aren't compelling or interesting enough to listen to on their own. This record succeeds at not only being interesting enough to warrant repeated listens, but shows Cul de Sac spreading their wings a little more.
For a band whose songs often stretch to 6 minutes and beyond, an album with 18 songs seems unlikely. However, as these songs are tailored to fit particular scenes, many of the tracks are short. Very short. In fact, only four break the 3-minute mark. While there are songs which suffer from not being allowed ample room to explore their bounds, there are plenty which are well formed and get their point across.
The sputtering wheeze of a treated melodica on "Pregnancy Test I" and "Pregnancy Test II" leads nicely into the propulsive guitar groove of "Tailing the Strangler," giving the album a much needed boost of energy halfway through an otherwise languid album. As fractured and schizophrenic as the shorter tracks may be when viewed separately, they flow into one another and take the form of a constantly shifting and ever intriguing mass over the course of the album. And the handful of songs that are given room to breathe all work to focus the
snippest and ideas presented in the shorter tracks.
Probably the only short track that really sticks out is "Flashback." While it's not hard to imagine this working well in context, a single drum rolling intermittently for just over 2 minutes falls a little short in an album.
Considered either as an album or a soundtrack, The Strangler's Wife is a
great follow-up to Death of the Sun. There was no way they could top that album, but they maintained the feel of it here and applied it to a different setting and intent.
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