James Lavelle’s UNKLE project has a go at film music. The mood is dark and tries hard to be edgy but succeeds in sounding like it was made for CSI Miami rather than a David Lynch spine tingler.

What you get are 10 vocal tracks featuring guest vocalists interspersed with 12 instrumentals. Two of the vocal tracks are real stunners, ‘Open Up Your Eyes’ featuring film director Abel Ferrara (’Bad Lieutenant’) on vocals and ‘Clouds’ featuring Canadian Alternative Rock band Black Mountain. Especially Abel’s Bob Dylan style ’stream of consciousness’ rant is worth a listen.

‘Against The Grain’ featuring Gavin Clark is a strong track with a slight hint of indie rock a la Radiohead. The remainder of the tracks on the album is torn between trying to create an ambience and delivering conventional songs with hooks and all. Rarely does ‘End Titles’ hit either of these two goals.

The instrumentals have moody sounding names like ‘Blade In The Back’, ‘Black Mass’ and ‘Kaned And Abel’. The music is quite tame, however.

I think it’s the straightlaced drumming that puts me off, especially on the instrumentals. There are notable exceptions, check ‘Chemical’ for some more challenging beats. It doesn’t help that UNKLE is mainly using cheesy Metal-style guitars for atmospheric effects.

There used to be whole bunch of hopeful film sondtrack writers who used to do that in the 1960’s: Write cool sounding titles and produce some, often very lame, approximation of beat or funk music to go with it. It’s called Library Music and some of it has its merits in retrospect. Ask me again in five years’ time, maybe ‘End Titles’ will sound better in retrospect, too.

I can’t help thinking that UNKLE could have done better, especially considering Lavelle’s previous displays of strict quality control as head of the Mo’Wax label.

Listen Here to ‘End Titles and download tracks you like from iTunes.

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