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by Marc Crewe (from Venue, 5-19 February 1999)
Patrice Toye's eerie, disturbing movie about the mental disintegration of an adolescent girl is still awaiting a UK release, but it's surely only a matter of time. The good news is that you don't have to wait for John Parish's soundtrack album, which features all the bleak beauty and sparse soundscapes you'd expect of a PJ Harvey collaborator creating an ambient score for a Belgian movie tackling themes of incest and child abduction. And blow me if it doesn't share the emotional wasteland territory of Parish and Polly's underrated classic Dance Hall At Louse Point, even if it is a bit more subdued. In fact, the one non-instrumental track, Pretty Baby, which boasts vocals by one Alison Goldfrapp, sounds an awful lot like the spectre of Polly herself. The recurring motif of juddering, echo-laden guitars, gets under your skin and into your head after a while, an ideal accompaniment to the internal fantasy world of the estranged eponymous heroine of the film, though it's familiar territory for Parish, who might easily have written an album like this with or without a movie in mind. At only 35 minutes, Rosie isn't the lenghtiest of experiences, but it's a quietly intense one while it lasts.
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