Although David Byrne’s Lead Us Not Into Temptation is composed almost entirely of moody incidental music, it’s still a work of art in its own right and easily the best movie score I’ve heard this century.
The soundtrack to David Mackenzie’s film Young Adam – based on notorious Scottish writer and heroin addict Alex Trocchi’s cult 1954 novel – this is a sort of homecoming for the Dumbarton-born former Talking Head. He returned to Scotland to write the music, and recruited members of respected local indie acts like Mogwai, Belle & Sebastian, The Reindeer Section and The Delgados to assist. It’s hard to tell who’s responsible for what, however, as the music is mostly so gently ambient as to be almost invisible. You stick it on and, as with a spliff you’ve forgotten you’ve just smoked, it slowly sneaks up on you.
Although the tracks are all interestingly titled – ‘Mnemonic Discordance’, ‘Sex On The Docks’, ‘Inexorable’, ‘Dirty Hair’ etc. – there are no real stand-outs as such, and it’s really much more of a complete 51-minute listening experience. Byrne’s vocals are only heard towards the end. He hums and warbles his way through ‘Speechless’ (ha!), and on album closer ‘The Great Western Road’ he sings; “Man sticks his fingers inside of his mouth/The words are stuck in there/He fishes them out.” For the most part though, the album is just a dreamy swirl of heavenly sounds and strange jazzy rhythms.
Byrne has already won an Oscar for his soundtrack work on The Last Emperor. This is probably much too subtle to bag him another, but it’s still a masterpiece of the OST genre. Listening to it gave me an urge not just to see the film, but also to re-read Trocchi’s superb novel – which says it all really.