Revisit of the Week: Daft Punk - Tron: Legacy OST (2010)
I hesitate to call it a trend but there was definitely some atypical eagerness in the early 2010s for Hollywood film studios to recruit electronic musicians to compose movie scores. It makes sense on paper though - many of these musicians had strongly established themselves as excellent scene-setters and mood-makers in their prior work, often being directly called "cinematic". So, why not dip outside the usual pool of established Hollywood film composers and utilise some of this talent clearly waiting to test their skills in actual scene-setting. Ultimately, Hollywood's gotta Hollywood and this new approach amounted to very little: in pretty much every case the results sounded watered down, like the sound of the musicians were being met in the middle by the big cinema need for generic orchestal background filler. The two biggest examples I can think of are M83's Oblivion OST from 2013, and then this.
For the record I haven't actually seen Tron: Legacy - I own this purely because of the Daft Punk connection, and even more specifically I have a copy because a friend of mine gifted it to me. So I am judging this based on the sound alone which is not always the ideal way to listen to a film soundtrack - even moreso than game music, film scores are often meant to fall in the background to invisibly highlight emotional beats, and even the best film scores reach the grand heights they do because of the scenes they soundtrack. But on the other hand, you can make an argument that this is the "pure" way of judging the music in its own terms - that you can only really tell if it's genuinely good if it stands on its own two feet without having to rely on the film. And to be fair to this soundtrack - I think it does. This is by no means Daft Punk at their most memorable, but it is often at the very least interesting. The pre-synthwave retro-futurist warbles are used to great effect, there are some very neat atmospheric moments reminiscent of space operas like Mass Effect, and the few times that the robot duo let loose by bringing their traditional tricks into this context the results are really good: see for example the single "Derezzed", which is painfully short considering it's one of the album's clear highlights.
You just don't get enough of that. This is where the Hollywood compromise comes in - rather than allowing Daft Punk to daftpunk all over the soundtrack, so much of this feels like an attempt to blend them into the established format so as not to scare film score snobs (!??!) too much. There are so many tracks here that could have come from absolutely anyone and which bear nothing that would identify them as Daft Punk's handiwork, and when you do get some of their signature elements and ideas into the mix the duo sound like guest features on their own album. I don't want to throw blame without the full facts but I am drawn to the fact that this album was co-arranged by Joseph Trapanese, who also produced the aforementioned Oblivion soundtrack; M83's Anthony Gonzalez has hinted retrospectively how he felt his creative control was compromised by the production company and some of his ideas had to be changed and resubmitted a number of times before they were accepted. One can't help but see some parallels...
As a soundtrack, this is decent; as a Daft Punk album, it lacks in personality. As a listening experience, this only ever gets drawn from the shelf when listening projects akin to this happen. The copy I have is the Special Edition, which basically means a slightly fancier packaging (thick 2-CD digipak) and a bonus disc with four extra songs. I have no recollection of any of them despite only just having listened to the lot.
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