It is quite the touching choice to pick a band such as Beak> (don’t forget the crocodile bite!) to soundtrack perhaps 2016’s most unnerving, fear-inducing British horror since Eden Lake. For those who have yet to see Couple In A Hole, it is essentially the story of a Scottish couple, in the French Pyrenees who live like savages within a hole. See, who said the obvious storyline/title relationships were old news? Nevertheless, Beak’s (okay, I’ve decided to drop the ‘>’ for the remainder of this review) array of mystic, Krautrock-fused samples meshed together with dilapidating rhythm sections leads for quite the ambient, atmospheric grounding. A third of Beak is developed by Geoff Barrow from the esteemed trip-hop group, Portishead. Barrow, who has also been busy coining Invada Records in his spare time, home to the likes of Gnod, White Hills and The KVB, finds the atmospheric, the darkness and the gothic uncanny second nature to his sound. Therefore, Beak and Couple In A Hole go skeletal hand in skeletal hand, like a ghost in a chapel, or a bat in a boudoir or whatever other piece of gothic imagery you want to pair with its significant, deathly other.

Beak are a band that you are likely to find stuck in a hole to be quite frank, their sound is as morbid and desolate as the mud that drips from the side of a freshly dug grave. This is no bad thing however, it is signature to the sound. Whirring guitar lapses over a decaying drum beat within ‘Battery Point’, the second track into their soundtrack. It is music less made for the warm summer that we seem to be descending upon but perhaps more in line with the icy, brash feeling upon a February morning. The delicacy that Barrow and his counterparts within Beak, Billy Fuller and Matt Williams, pour into the music is something that distances and isolate their audience from themselves. ‘Battery Point’ rings, the guitar sections build and the thud of the gut-collapsing bass rumbles in, it’s prominent and surprisingly does not sound too dissimilar from the likes of Queens of the Stone Age’s ‘I Appear Missing’.

As the Couple In A Hole OST grows from the rumbling ‘Battery Point’ through to its predecessor, we tend to find the real bite and gloom that Beak bring with their latest release. ‘Nailsea’ manages to do what most gothic sounding tracks fail to do and that is to make the fearful sound obscurely optimistic. From studying Gothic literary techniques in-depth at A-Level, the use of the ‘uncanny’ and obscure is a technique widely employed by the likes of Bram Stoker and Emily Brontë – not easy to do, but Beak have found their grain at perfectly building it here. At 1:07 seconds long, it is a gloomy shadow behind the curtain, a brief nosedive and taste of the truly fearful set to emerge.

‘How Nice Is This’, the following track, drags you further and further into it. It’s brief again but with a confused, rhetorical title like this, its sparsity reflects that innocent possession that a confused character may feel in a film. Slightly like something from The Yellow Wallpaper, it is that self-convincing, that borderline insanity that is suggested and implied. ‘Eggdog’ is Radiohead’s Amnesiac-era work dressed up for Halloween. It’s slowed down and acts as the first real introduction to Beak’s vocal escapades within Couple In A Hole; the vocals cruise around in the nonchalant way grating above pounding rhythms and whirling synth sounds that bulge and distend.

With A Couple In A Hole, Beak have not completely written music afresh for the purpose of this release. In fact, five of the tracks lean upon their first two LP releases, including the aforementioned ‘Battery Point’ and ‘Eggdog’ – 2009’s self-titled issue and 2012’s ‘>>’ release are not used as crutches, but as solid support. ‘Flax Bourton’ being another one of them that takes from that eerie viola scratching that John Cale taught us so much about back in the 60s, it builds around IDM styles, clanging soundscapes and light chatter. It’s atmospheric and adds to the drama ten-fold, allowing it to be one of the standout pieces from the OST.

The reason it is unfair to suggest Beak have used their debut release as a crutch is due to the potential that the vast amount of their new music holds. ‘PIJ’ holds a sincere root in post-rock with its ambivalent time signature and jarring guitar sections spliced with some off-cut strings that drag the song down a myriad of medieval passageways, this only emphasising the enigmatic fear that lurks. ‘The Axe’ too, full of off-centre metallic sounds, reuniting with ‘The Cornubia’ sees another move back to their debut, fitting the hopelessness the track poses with the isolation and emptiness of the film.

As the film ends on the bass-driven ‘I Know’, another track that features on their debut release, Beak close their OST scoring. The tracks that are picked from their earlier releases showcase a band that have an otherworldly awareness of how their sound fits within the film context. They are exceptionally well-picked and if anything, it should be a pleasure for fans to hear these songs in a different context, perhaps a more fitting context. The songs and the film work well together, complementing one another consistently. Where fans may feel slightly disappointed is in the new songs, not because of their quality but because of their quantity. Overall, they tend to linger around the minute mark, a few edge over but generally, you are only treated to twelve minutes or so of new content. A little bit of a cop-out some may feel, however for a band as ambivalent as Beak, it’s nice to see them return no matter the quantity they present in their new form.
Tom Churchill

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