British sea power man of aran zip
Ostentatious, self-serious revisionism has been one of British Sea Power's fortes ever since they packaged their debut album as a "Classic" work of history, so it's easy to see why, 75 years later, they'd be up to the unique task of redoing the score for Aran.
The Quietus wonderfully explained the unique collusion between narrative and time, calling it "a 21st century attempt to complement a 20th century film about an often 19th century way of life. It becomes quickly clear that, while their interpretation is sympathetic to the original, BSP are meeting Flaherty on their own terms. The band repurposed three of its own moody, atmospheric numbers for inclusion in the score "North Hanging Rock", "True Adventures", and "The Great Skua" , winkingly name the last piece "No Man Is an Archipelago", and has been brazen enough in the liner notes to regard Aran , which Flaherty intended originally to be a noble man vs.
It doesn't rise to the level of firing squad, but the band's cover of "Come Wander With Me", a Jeff Alexander number originally included in a "Twilight Zone" episode , is the starkest example of the band's own form of poetic license. The song's lyrics are mundane romantic escapism, standing in stark counterpoint to the scene they butt heads with: a family scours its barren home for seaweed and returns home with their catch strapped to horses, walking waist-deep in water.
They'll "wander" later, thanks. Part of the mystery of BSP's score, indeed, is trying to parse if the band's actively playing with the touristic gaze that Flaherty was immune to, or if they're just ignoring it. Either way, it's sort of eerie. When the score and visuals work together, though, the effect can be stunning. As the men return from an expedition in a small canoe, the opening "The South Sound" sequence flows forward from a nervous first movement of minor key piano and dark cello into a tumultuous post-rock freakout, as the family is thrown against the rocks by the sea's raging waves, trying to bring ashore the day's catch.
The sequence crosscuts between a young boy catching a fish with a rock tied to a string and a group of men showing how adults do it-- killing a shark with a spear, from a tiny fishing boat.
As Flaherty cuts to a shot of the grizzled hunters cresting a hill, BSP swell to a crescendo straight out of Hollywood, and it's the most goosebump-inducing moment in the film. The sequence doesn't let up for several minutes, either-- even as a recreation, it took two days to get the shark back to shore-- and when the men are struggling with the shark, Flaherty's rapid cutting works perfectly with BSP's rocking the fuck out.
An important thing to keep in mind when watching Aran is that British Sea Power were most likely not willing or able to alter the original film in any way, and this tether often works to their disadvantage. For his part, Flaherty was working several decades before video killed the radio star, and the band doesn't work too hard to meet his s style halfway. There are a more than a few times, then, when BSP's attempts to build dramatic tension feel out of sync with Flaherty's pacing and technique.
The songs vary between dreamy, near-acoustic reveries and dramatic electronic epics, reflecting a film that drifts between stagey visions of a lost way of life and rawer scenes of unforgiving, awesome nature. Of the briefer songs, Man of Aran somehow combines stillness and grandeur, a piano endlessly looping while synths rumble like whales in the depths. Of the epics, the Neu! The songs which work best when divorced from the film are Boy Vertiginous, with its delicately plucked guitars and descending chords, and the graceful, shimmering It Comes Back Again, which has the spooked ecstasy and echoing synths of Primal Scream's Higher Than The Sun.
Less effective are Tiger King, which meanders vaguely when not propped up by the film's imagery, and the only vocal song, the cloying, folksy duet Come Wander With Me. In a world where most indie shufflers are so desperate to cling to success that they would never risk surprising their audience, British Sea Power are to be cherished for their originality and daring.
The strange and beautiful Man Of Aran demonstrates why. This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Licence. If you choose to use this review on your site please link back to this page. This page has been archived and is no longer updated. Find out more about page archiving. Home Clips.
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