Scott Glasgow’s latest score deals with seedy crime elements are threatened by an escaped mental patient, and the urban location gives the composer a chance to incorporate heavy electronic sounds into an already broad orchestral palette.

Much like Chasing Ghosts (2006), Glasgow knows how to enhance tension and create chilly atmospheres using very sparse sounds. Despite some heavy percussion tracks (like the opening “The Psychic” and “Rooftop Chase”), most of the cues evoke a sense of pursuit, and Glasgow keeps creating new tension motifs that are slick, funky, and appropriately dissonant.

In “Duality,” Glasgow uses is a rippling metallic beat with processed sounds, and employs a thick electric bass groove that wafts back and forth. “Kitchen Fight” is propelled by exotic percussion (Bourne-style) as well as deep fuzz guitar and an undulating, screechy tone.

 “Lucille” is a more introspective cue wherein a tragic theme is played by a distant, slightly detuned string instrument, around which harmonic clouds hover and shift from moods of ambivalence to personal grief. Glasgow also emphasizes coarse string vibrato on bass, as well as electronic tones, and in the brief “The Accident” he employs two voices that eventually coalesce into a compact statement on human tragedy.

“Nadia Talks to Angel / Michelle” contains a delicate piano performance, and Glasgow creates fluctuations of emotional intensity by playing with background drones, and adding an occasional bass rumble. “Consolation” also marks a shift in warmer instrumentation, with piano, woodwinds, and ambient voices providing an otherworldly veneer. The theme in “There Can Be Only One” is also more precisely rendered, although Glasgow then warps and demonizes the main sections in the short theme mutation “Transmogrification.”

Most of the album cues are brief (ranging from under a minute to just shy of three minutes), but they’ve been edited into a tight narrative, and there’s a good balance between hard action cuts and quiet character statements. The score’s engineering is first rate, ensuring the deep bass tones and drones are aggressive and cool, and each subtlety in the score’s sharp orchestration comes through in full detail in this fine album.

Although the score sort of winds down and ends abruptly (the last two cues are less than a minute), Toxic is high recommended as a fine action/suspense hybrid.

© 2009 Mark R. Hasan