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by Darren Johns (from NME, March 1999)
Taking into account that the mood of a film is always reflected in the soundtrack, Patrice Toye’s Belgian film Rosie must be as desolate and existential as it is art-house. For here, PJ Harvey collaborator, producer and all-round serious muso John Parish has stripped back his moody template to a bleak blues that chills with its authentic air of detachment. Paradoxically, he’s pulled out all the stops to create the ambient sparseness of the continental avant-garde. The 13 excerpts on the LP are essentially fleeting incidental passages which work wonders with your imagination, even without the film’s visual guidance. Stripped of vocals – with the exception of Tricky cohort Alison Goldfrapp’s frail tones on the clipped neo-jazz of Pretty Baby - it imparts an almost unbearable emotional solitude. The lone guitar sadness of Rosie Rosita, the Swans-like emptiness of Pipeline Disturbance - these send weighty sensations from a thousand beautifully shot Euro-tragedies racing through you like particularly acute drowners. In winter. In Iceland.
Not an LP for the office party, then, but one which
will assist in the reading of those Kafka novels
gathering dust on your shelves.
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