The third album from London composer Bastien Keb is a soundtrack to a nonexistent film: a gloomy, dreamlike suite that summons the vintage sounds of 1970s giallo films and French New Wave.
Consider the tradition of the imaginary movie soundtrack. From Brian Eno’s ambient collection Music for Films to the Olivia Tremor Control’s kaleidoscopic opus Dusk at Cubist Castle (not to mention lesser-known specimens, such as Barry Adamson’s remarkably creepy Moss Side Story), songwriters have been crafting soundtracks to movies that exist only in their minds for more than 40 years. Sure, scoring an actual film is more lucrative for a working musician, but scoring a nonexistent one may be the more fulfilling creative endeavor: You don’t have to cater to anyone’s vision but your own, and your work will never be tainted by association with a mediocre film.
The Killing of Eugene Peeps, the third album from the London multi-instrumentalist known as Bastien Keb (born Sebastien Jones), is a fascinating new entry in the imaginary-soundtrack category. Keb is a lifelong cinephile—a former video store clerk who spent long, customerless shifts immersing himself in movies—and a composer who knows a thing or two about scoring, having crafted music for TV commercials and documentaries. But no commercial sounds like The Killing of Eugene Peeps, a gloomy, dreamlike suite that summons the vintage sounds of 1970s giallo films and 1960s French New Wave with remarkable specificity.
Keb’s previous albums, 2015’s Dinking in the Shadows of Zizou and 2017’s 22.02.85, gravitated towards a genre-fluid style of jazzy trip-hop with a skewed aesthetic, and even drew some raves from U.K.-based music press. But Eugene Peeps swaps out the beat-driven sound for creaky analog intimacy. There’s an eclectic array of borrowed or found instrumentation: trumpet, bass, flute—even a singing saw floats into the mix on the standout “Young Ponies.” Like a sprawling narrative arc, the music shifts from rickety jazz (“Israel Ate His Own Mind”) to funk (“Street Clams”) to brooding, meditative passages with relative ease. Recurring motifs percolate throughout, and as if the cinematic theme needs further underscoring, the album cover looks like a poster for the kind of fictitious film-within-a-film that might crop up in a Tarantino screenplay.
The most engrossing cinematic flourish, however, is the recurring narration by Keb’s friend Kenneth Viota, who takes the lead on a series of spoken-word passages adapted from Keb’s own journals. In an interview with Bandcamp Daily, Keb described creating the record while coping with the misery of a night-shift warehouse job: “I was a zombie for a year,” he said, “piecing the album together while I was working.” Viota’s coarse growl, and his darkly funny mutterings of desolation and depression (“They’ll be better times ahead—I hear hell’s nice this time of year,” he deadpans in “The World Creaks”), reflect that mind state and recall the seedier spoken-word tracks from Rain Dogs-era Tom Waits. (Keb’s own voice couldn’t be more different; his layered falsetto on songs like “Rabbit Hole” bears a curious resemblance to Justin Vernon.)
If the resulting record sounds like an obscure ’70s soundtrack culled from a dollar bin, that’s by design. Keb commits to the bit, and his fluency with the vocabulary of film scoring means that he is capable of summoning the expressive eccentricity of Ennio Morricone (“Can’t Sleep”) or the roiling, low brass intensity of Bernard Herrmann’s Taxi Driver score (“Bookie”). By contrast, the rap cut “Paprika,” featuring a freewheeling verse by Nottingham rapper Cappo, feels conspicuously out of place—it’s the one moment where the film-score illusion shatters.
At 18 tracks, The Killing of Eugene Peeps is undeniably ambitious and occasionally scattershot, but never tedious. It helps that the music is constantly shifting, mutating between styles and tones—often within the realm of a single song—like an anthology film caught between genres. Take “Theme for an Old Man,” for example: In less than four minutes, the track unfolds from doomy brass squalls that evoke a specter of violence to a warped trip-hop groove befitting a DJ Shadow production. From there, the beat drops out and a miniature symphony of descending strings lingers in the air like cigarette smoke, pointing the way to the mournful timbre of “Can’t Sleep.” You may not know much about the characters or storyline, but with music like this, there’s a film in your head, too.
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