Is Daniel Lopatin his generation's finest film score composer?

With the most recent of these collaborations, the Safdie brothers asked him to soundtrack their psychedelic crime romp Good Time (2017). The throbbing, aggressive outcome, heavily inspired by Tangerine Dream’s score for William Friedkin’s The Sorcerer, could be considered one of the greatest soundtracks in existence, and it won the Soundtrack Award at the 2017 Cannes Film Festival. Of course it is, Lopatin had all this experience of providing ambient, swirling and motorik backgrounds for pictures that weren’t even, and would never be, made. How else would he approach scoring Robert Pattinson’s attempts to free his mentally challenged brother from hospital arrest, filled with LSD, neon lights and chuck load of immorality, than with the expertise of an artist who has honed his craft through a career of making faux soundtracks?

Now, Lopatin (further known as Chuck Person and Dania Shapes) has gone onto score the Safdie brothers’ latest film under his birth name, unlike Good Time’s OST which was released under the Oneohtrix Point Never moniker. Uncut Gems has been described as a crime thriller which sees Adam Sandler play a NYC jeweller who struggles to balance family and business life with his penchant for a high-risk big money score. The soundtrack is further proof Lopatin will be held in the same esteem as Ennio Morricone, John Carpenter, Vangelis and so on.

Where Good Time and its soundtrack were positively devoid of any emotion and morality, the Uncut Gems OST is filled with heartfelt synth lines, gorgeous revolving, spacey sequences and emotive samples. Lopatin has taken everything that was perfect about Good Time’s score and applied it to a wider cast of instruments and production techniques. Listening to each track can only paint a vivid picture of what Sandler and his supporting cast (including ex-NBA legend Kevin Garnett, Lakeith Stanfield and Julia Fox) must be doing in the movie.

We’re treated to Lopatin’s trademark ambience and atmosphere building throughout the album but he now has a specific scenario onto which he can build that atmosphere. It says something when an artist produces a soundtrack that could easily fit into their solo, non-soundtrack output but has moving images to go with it.

We begin with “The Ballad of Howie Bling”. An instant reminder of the beauty almost all of Lopatin’s work as Oneohtrix Point Never contained. Velvet waves battle as a lush sine stabs through a melody. The rumble of synths breaks as a sax-esque line greets us as if Vangelis had played it himself. Before long a beat starts and an oscillator softly backs a melody seemingly shouted by a choir. It’s all very Brian Eno but it works. One can only begin to imagine how perfect it will sound against Sandler’s internal fracturing surrounded by the iconography and towers of New York.

The record continues in the same vein, alternating between sultry, electronic goodness that puts you in a warm place juxtaposed with something more sinister and tense afoot. A number of tracks barely make a minute, unlike a lot of Lopatin’s work as Oneohtrix Point Never in which each song tends to range between pop song and very long pop song length. Something which is further uncharacteristic of the type of music Lopatin makes, where there can be a tendency for one song to last an entire album.

Spliced into a number of the tracks are also snippets of the film’s dialogue. Sandler paints a picture of desiring to provide his wife a long vacation for some culture in Europe before a thick buzz explodes in an array of fuzzy sine waves in “No Vacation”.

“School Play” is the closest we come to the Good Time score. The oscillations are intense and the tones harsh. This builds and builds and begins to increase in tempo until a climax that rings out in aggressive, robotic jubilance. When this is cut short, Sandler cries “help, help, help” as if he wants saving from the intensity of the song and Lopatin’s efforts to create music that really shunts you to the edge of your seat regardless of whether what you are looking at is tense or not.

“Fuck You Howard” is somewhere between “Chariots of Fire” and Crystal Castles’ first album. It’s epic but each note punches hard with a sparkling afterthought. We’re very much in Lopatin’s territory now and he really plays with the listener, experimenting with what a soundtrack can be. With what an orchestra of instruments can be. Quite like Oneohtrix Point Never’s latest album, Age Of, there is a lot of vocal samples used in the same way a piano would be or a stringed instrument would be, they create the melody. This record is far from a classical film score but that’s not to say it couldn’t be played by an orchestra, each note is there for a reason.

“Back to Rosalyn” has a synth tone that breaks through background whirls quite suddenly but instantly takes us back, or forward, to Rick Deckard’s hovercraft hurtling over a Los Angeles devestated by pollution and advertising. “Windows” contains a number of pretty percussion loops that provide a constant rhythm which isn’t seen (but also isn’t missed) in the majority of the other tracks on the album. Final and title track “Uncut Gems” is Lopatin at his world-building best. Worlds that are so unknown, yet somewhere that we know all too well. The melodies are slick and sweet and everything seems so perfectly orchestrated. It’s classic Lopatin. He knows what is expected of him but still has the artistry to push those boundaries, almost to deny anyone the right to pin down his style or what genre he falls into but still doing everything he does so well.

Uncut Gems is a triumph. The Oneohtrix Point Never albums occupy almost every different mood the human body is capable of expressing and now Lopatin’s soundtrack work is starting to do the same. We’ve had the moody, anxious Lopatin on Good Time and now Uncut Gems has allowed him to show his more thoughtful and emotional side. The one concern I find with this record is that it’s hard to imagine it soundtracks real people doing real things and not robots warring on far away planets. In saying that, one thing Lopatin’s music is very capable of doing is showing us how everyday things are still very alien no matter how comfortable we think we are with them. It’s music to take the train somewhere you’ve never been to before or take the scenic route back from work to. Maybe even music to soundtrack your last big money score.