• Record Label: Warp
  • Release Date: Jan 8, 2013
Metascore
75

Generally favorable reviews - based on 27 Critic Reviews

Critic score distribution:
  1. Positive: 21 out of 27
  2. Negative: 0 out of 27
  1. 70
    What’s left is a truly beautiful, if slightly dishevelled, gothic menagerie, amongst the last of an intact Broadcast’s recorded works, and a great inducement to see this movie so apparently rich in sound, terror, and beauty.
  2. Feb 5, 2013
    60
    Berberian Sound Studio is far from an essential album, but it's definitely a welcome surprise addition for fans of Broadcast, the movie itself or fans of Italian horror soundtrack artists such as Goblin.
  3. Feb 1, 2013
    90
    The echoes of previously heard themes, motifs make for a compelling examination of memory and experience as much as for an effective soundtrack.
  4. Q Magazine
    Jan 24, 2013
    60
    It's best experienced with the lights out, although as with most film music, it loses some frisson separated from Strickland's lurid images. [Feb 2013, p.102]
  5. Jan 22, 2013
    85
    Marked with woe from beginning to end, BerberianSoundStudio is closer to antichrist than Hallelujah, but Broadcast reminds you that divinity is intrinsic with death.
  6. Mojo
    Jan 18, 2013
    80
    This is beautiful music. [Feb 2013, p.91]
  7. Jan 17, 2013
    60
    The best songs are the few featuring Keenan's lovely voice, like Teresa, Lark Of Ascension, which serves as a sad reminder of the talent we lost.
  8. 80
    The period-precise score captures the claustrophobic dread and paranoia of the fictional film shoot documented in Berberian Sound Studio.
  9. Jan 14, 2013
    70
    The music doesn't need film imagery to be deeply unsettling.
  10. Jan 14, 2013
    90
    Berberian Sound Studios is a wonderful, intense and darkly beautiful legacy to Keenan's unique character, and testament to the band's continuing ability as their world changes.
  11. Jan 14, 2013
    70
    This is an album worth hearing, not least because it will make you want to see the film.
  12. As a soundtrack, sure; as a record, one for the completist.
  13. The Wire
    Jan 8, 2013
    50
    Here, the 70s simulations, artful enough in their own way, are presented straight. The result, sadly, doesn't evoke 70s Italian Horror; it merely makes one think of already-over-familiar period and genre signifiers. [Jan 2013, p.62]
  14. Jan 8, 2013
    70
    This sinister, skittering collection (recorded before the sad passing of singer Trish Keenan in 2011) is the perfect compliment to Peter Strickland's marvellous film.
  15. Jan 8, 2013
    75
    Berberian Sound Studio successfully builds on the spectral philosophy of Radio Age, and is even more of a radically disjointed tapestry of occult and funereal sound than that album was.
  16. Jan 7, 2013
    80
    Berberian Sound Studio is like a notebook filled with a lost love's handwriting.
  17. Jan 7, 2013
    80
    Clever, eerie, and beautiful, Berberian Sound Studio is the perfect accompaniment to a film that examines the nature of fear and sound's part in it, and it's wonderful to hear Cargill continue Broadcast's legacy with a project so tailored to their strengths.
  18. Jan 7, 2013
    70
    Broadcast's soundtrack for Berberian Sound Studio is a triumph not just because it is inescapably aware of itself as a soundtrack but also serves as a fitting epitaph for the band's singularity and vision throughout their all-too-brief career.
  19. Jan 7, 2013
    70
    All in all, Berberian Sound Studio is a surprisingly complete and coherent effort, not simply for a soundtrack, but, frankly, more for the difficult conditions Cargill must've faced in bringing it to fruition.
  20. 60
    It's presented as 39 miniature sonic studies in the vein of European "library music" fragments, interspersed with dialogue clips from the movie and sound effects to evoke the protagonist's deteriorating mindset.
  21. Jan 4, 2013
    80
    Berberian Sound Studio and Broadcast are a perfect match, and this soundtrack--something you may not want to listen to alone if you keep hearing a weird noise outside the window--gives you an idea of how magnificent this band can be.
  22. Jan 4, 2013
    80
    As extraordinary and original as the film itself, Berberian Sound Studio is both a bona fide film score and consistent electronica album, and in the wake of Trish Keenan's tragic death carries the very real air of a requiem.
  23. Jan 3, 2013
    70
    Cargill's interspersion of snippets of sound and dialogue from the film adds considerably to the overall experience, providing chilling and entertaining context along the way. [Jan-Feb 2013, p.87]
  24. Jan 3, 2013
    90
    It doubtless works best heard in the cinema or the home theatre, and especially in the context of Julian House's beautifully lurid title sequence.
  25. Jan 3, 2013
    80
    With its 30-second cues and oblique titles, it resembles one of those old library albums Broadcast were so influenced by in the first place.
  26. Jan 3, 2013
    74
    What prevents Berberian Sound Studio from being a genre exercise is the care taken to paper over the cracks, to find some common ground between droney, Popol Vuh-type material ("Valeria's Burial (Under the Fort)") and more visceral horror soundtrack work (the positively seething "The Game's Up").
  27. Jan 3, 2013
    80
    A haunting memorial.

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