Good Time [Original Motion Picture Soundtrack]

As a coherent album, it’s an affecting listen. The samples of dialogue that occasionally flicker behind the dense aural foliage, Burial-like, provide a human counterpoint to this austere, automated music, organic glows that briefly distract from Lopatin’s caustic waves of electronica.

It’s a masterful job of homage, and—as with Thief and Drive before it--all those pulsating synths and cavernous low tones give the film much of its swagger, and they promise to intensify your own, far less exciting commute as well.

Good Time feels like the most mainstream synthesis of Lopatin’s output thus far. The music here actively channels the influences of his youth--sounds that many of us are familiar with from movies, television, and video games--but makes them new and relevant given the propulsive nature of what we’re hearing.

Aas Good Time shows, his skills have caught up with his ambition.

It's easy to hear why Good Time won an award before the film was even in wide release: The way Oneohtrix Point Never's score bridges character, setting, and mood offers much more than a passive backdrop.

By insisting on its purpose as soundtrack, Daniel Lopatin addresses that separation head-on. This defiance asserts Good Time as a record to listen to in the here and now, with or without its filmic accompaniment.

The film nods are everywhere--the futurist grandeur of Brad Fiedel’s Terminator soundtrack, heavy shades of John Carpenter and Alan Howarth’s malevolent, exacting synthscapes, and touches of Vangelis and Popol Vuh’s ambience; Romance Apocalypse recalls the amphetamine clatter of Jan Hammer’s Miami Vice theme. But the sheer density and erratic energy is all Lopatin’s own.

The director has previously been namechecked by Lopatin as an early idol. Consciously or not, he applies a more vivid psychedelic impulse to a comparable tying together of sound and vision. [Aug 2017, p.56]

There's no doubt Good Time OST absolutely sounds like a movie score, but every single track here stands on its own, providing an intensely emotional punch to the gut.

Good Time invites emotional confusion along multiple vectors. Lopatin’s score opens fissures that let its beauty and ambivalences burrow deep under your skin.