An Offbeat by CFUV album review
Photo via FilmSpeak.
I Saw The TV Glow, Jane Schoenbrun’s 2024 horror drama film, opens with Yeule’s cover of “Anthems for a Seventeen Year-Old Girl.” Originally by Broken Social Scene, the song is a timeless Canadian classic that sounds older than it is with the colour of an analog vocoder and phaser. The repetitive closing line — “park that car, drop that phone, sleep on the floor, dream about me” — has garnered recent memetic status. Yeule makes it their own with crystalline, glitchy vocals, which sound somehow clearer and more distorted than the original.
Yeule trades banjo for these glittery vocal chops and rearranges the verses, but the spirit of the original song remains, in a wistful string melody, filter sweeps, and an insistent refrain that recalls long-gone adolescence. The cover of “Anthems” is a perfect introduction to the soundtrack’s ethos: a unique, sprawling, and magnetic triumph.
Over an hour long, the album is remarkably cohesive patchwork, a satisfying standalone while still coupling perfectly with the film. A rarity in film soundtracks, every song was commissioned specifically for the film from different artists, and the success of this style of scoring will no doubt set a precedent for soundtracks to come.
The commonly expressed nostalgia for the early days of the digital age — clunky interfaces, tube televisions, retro arcade machines — knits the album together. The movie is full of visual references to ‘90s pop culture, and the soundtrack follows suit. The characters in the film visit a bar that parallels the Roadhouse in Twin Peaks, and Phoebe Bridgers and Sloppy Jane sing “Claw Machine,” a slow lullaby that imitates the reverb-heavy ballads found in Twin Peaks.
Beyond these clear-cut allusions, the musical references are subtler than the visual ones, giving way to a soft but unwavering stuck-in-time feeling. The contemporary stars that feature on the soundtrack — like Bridgers and Yeule — reimagine and adjust their sound to match, half present tense and half artefact, partially true to the sound of their modernist indie work, but with one foot in the past. The film deals with memory and buried emotion, and the soundtrack, informed by past decades, reflects this.
I Saw the TV Glow blurs the lines between reality, fiction, imagination, and memory, and explores the transformation and reassertion of childhood experience throughout a lifetime. In what ways are we forever unknown to ourselves, and how will what we bury within resurface in time?
On “Another Season,” a dynamic but tender indie rock track, Frances Quinlan asks, “If this isn’t over, what else could take shape? How will you remember it?” Beginning with a sparse vocal and electric guitar line, the music swells after the first verse and a harsher guitar enters, followed by punchy drums and bass. By the end of the song, these compete with overdriven and overlapping vocals which repeat “even if this isn’t over,” in striking contrast to what started out as a gentle inquiry into permanence. The emotional crescendo of this song plays during the end credits, the coda to a deliberately arranged set of songs, each furthering the central concerns of the film –– the recurrence of the past, repression and release, and the interplay between real life and fantasy.
Florist’s Emily Sprague recalls adolescent alienation on the plaintive, dreamy ballad “Riding Around in the Dark.” The song opens with the sounds of strings and lightly strummed acoustic guitar, and later drums that come and go. The lyrics bring us to a parking lot, moonlight, and the slow apocalypse, weaving into the tapestry of longing and separation that comprises the soundtrack. By the time the movie ends, one is left with the impression of having been transported elsewhere and then left alone, disoriented, haunted by loss and possibility and the passage of time. This is due in large part to the soundtrack, which, like any original score worth its salt, not only complements a narrative, but defines it.
