The Gloria Bell Soundtrack Album.

Film Sebastián Lelio's Gloria Bell is a pretty good English language remake of the director's own 2013 film Gloria, this time starring Julianne Moore as the lonely divorcee who meets an unreliable jerk played by John Turturro.

It's fine.  As ever, Moore's performance elevates the otherwise pretty bland material.

But what really powers the drama is Matthew Herbert's score, an electronic orchestral wonderland which, if you're watching with headphones as I did, marinades your ears in major key as it charts the protagonists emotional ups and down.

The whole thing is on Spotify:



But honestly the title track is the most alluring, with its four note hook and automatic earwig, evoking the highs of new love.



About the only oddity is that some of the tracks sound like they're about to head off into an electronic free jazz improvisation of the K9 and Company theme:





Or perhaps that's just my fan gene taking a bath.

"Gotta get up, gotta out ..."

Music Oh so that's why the oft played Harry Nilson song in the Netflix dramedy Russian Doll seems so familiar. Good grief.

WQXR.

Music The other night I discovered a new classic music station out of New York, WQXR. It's wall to wall music broken only by local news broadcasts on the hour, brief adverts for itself and sponsor notations read by the DJs. 

There's also a connected live stream called New Sounds which seems like twenty-four hour Late Junction which I've been dipping in and out of although it requires a bit more concentration.

Never Say Never Ever.

Music The All Saints are back again and unlike the proper Sugababes actually have an album coming out which is just so typically All Saints and also so typically proper Sugababes. There's the inevitable interview, with ID (of course) which isn't just a typical fluff piece as Mel B (no not that one) goes off-piste on why it went wrong last time:

…and this was looking back on the last All Saints comeback, which you'd previously said you'd done for the right reasons. You said: "I don't think we did it for the right reasons, I did it for the money…"
Shaz: (To Mel) Did you?
Mel: Yes, because I didn't like it.

And there's more: "It wasn't like we felt we had something to give back to the world."
Shaz: No way! Well that's her own opinion.
Mel: Well that was just me. My heart wasn't really in it.
Nic: That was Mel personally, but it wasn't all of us.
Mel: But it was absolutely how I felt. Because you know what, we got signed [to Parlophone] having not made one piece of music. They signed the idea of us getting back together. I felt fraudulent from that moment on and it didn't feel like a real thing.

It goes on but that explains a lot.

  As I said at the time (ten years ago, this blog is old) the single, Rock Steady was fine but a bit inauthentically All Saints.

Listening now, it's not bad and certainly retains the London sound and does fit within previous strategies, but it doesn't splash in the way it needed to, feeling more like a third or fourth single off the album rather than "Wow, the All Saints are back, back, back!"

The problem was it turned out to be the strongest track on the subsequent album which sounded mediocre in comparison to the solo work of Mel, Shaznay and the Appletons.

The new album's called Red Flag which makes it a bit difficult to find on Amazon but I'll pre-ordered it anyway when it's made available.