CINEOLA
★★★★
Don’t be misled by the opener to Matt Johnson’s third soundtrack for one of his younger brother Gerard’s films. It’s not the Prince-like reinvention its title, I Want 2 B U, suggests, and though its pivotal Omnichord – a pleasantly innocentsounding Suzuki keyboard released in 1981 and vital two years later to Soul Mining’s This Is The Day – returns him to his roots, this is the only ‘traditional’ song on offer here. It is, however, a wonderful reminder of how he used to write, and 17 other instrumental tracks are fortunately worth the price of admission, too. Admittedly, they make 1986’s Infected seem like breezy pop in comparison, so it might therefore be surprising to learn The Guardian defined Muscle as a “brutally black comedy”. But they also described it as “nightmarish”, with praise for its “exquisitely menacing atmosphere” surely indebted to this score.