For his second feature film as director, Chris Gorak carries over his taste for electronic textures and has Tyler Bates craft one of his least aggressive scores in years. Like Gorak’s debut, Right at Your Door (2006), scored by tomandandy, Bates opted for electronic textures that organically flow, ebbing and occasionally cresting with thick waves of distortion or pressurized clusters of electronic notes. Most of the action cues don’t’ materialize until the end, leaving the album’s first two-thirds as a moody, non-melodic sea of textures, ripples, and bass slams.

Bates does employ some orchestral sounds at times – notably in the kinetic “Night Club Attack,” which in one instance bears more than a passing resemblance to Brian Reitzell’s 30 Days of Night (a sign of an overloaded temp track, perhaps?) – but they tend to be rather amorphous, constantly wafting from orchestral to digitally processed sounds. Bates is a master at blending material into fluid dramatic cues, yet his use of samples and processing never pushes a score into an over-produced work.

The trick with Hour is to give it multiple plays, because without a firm, lengthy central theme, much of what plays is purely atmospheric, and like Reitzell’s 30 Days (2007) or Michl Britsch’s Pandorum (2009), the sleekness of the composer’s bleak vision grows on the listener. Bates tends to get hired for heavy action or gory thrillers, but in Hour he seems to have been given long scenes where mood tends to dominate any action; his cues frequently infer potential mayhem before it occurs, allowing for long stretches of sonic angst (notably “Here’s Our Mission”) before the album’s final handful of cues provide a needed action-oriented wrap-up and emergence of his compact theme.

Lakeshore’s CD (also available as a download) tags 9 mins. of two source songs at the beginning, but the score feels complete and satisfying, and much of the nuances inherent to Bates’ writing come through nicely in this well-mastered album.

© 2012 Mark R. Hasan