Jeffrey Dean Foster’s That's All We Are began as film soundtrack commission but it’s always reductive to view such work as totally clinical, and no matter the seeming objectivity, circumstance and environment invariably bleed into process. With time these little sequences, ethereal translucent vignettes, took on an (after)life of their own.

Composed and initially recorded for Angus Machlachlan’s 2017 movie Abundant Acreage Available in a time of transition and downsizing, they were created in a tiny space with the minutiae of life carrying on quite literally around him while he dug into memory and reflection. For patterns or exemplars he fetched up Neil Young's After the Gold Rush – in its spawning out of Dean Stockwell’s film script, Jack Nitzsche's One Flew Over The Cuckoo's Nest soundtrack, and Cliff Martinez’s work on The Knick.

Save for one shiny pop song briefly calling back his pair of career-defining solo albums Million Star Hotel and The Arrow it’s almost entirely a set of instrumentals. Often skeletal cinematic conjurings, where ghosts of screen or sound meet, they hint at both internal and external phenomena and seem connected to the already released ‘I’m Starting To Bleed’ written and recorded in response to the murder of George Floyd. Additionally it’s not that great a leap to discern elements of library music, the Ghost Box cohort, and even something of The Caretaker in the recurring motif of a Stephen Foster melody.

The record begins ghostly with ‘Night’; a sparse entrance, guitar, piano, then banjo morphing into tense strings. Covering much ground in its brief passage, reviving childhood memories of Peter And The Wolf while hinting at an Appalachian take on Kate Bush’s ‘The Ninth Wave’. Then follows ‘Tin Roof’, initially a halting musical conversation resembling one of Dylan’s interludes for Pat Garrett And Billy The Kid before turning its face into the eye of a storm.

The burst of ‘Sunshine’ arrives as another type of phantom; the ghost of the days that used to be. Meeting the morning in an instant of total pop; all arpeggiated synth, bright Californian vibe and harmony; a brief uplift but then a slump towards melancholy in “waking from my dreams”. Though maybe stepping into another, given one plausible take views That's All We Are as a showreel of dreams.

The ‘Abundant Acreage Available Theme’ is a waltz based on ‘Beautiful Dreamer’ with a carnival vibe – organ and vibraphones - that might draw your mind towards the Heavens Gate roller-rink. It doesn’t so much end as disappear, playing out to eternity like the Titanic orchestra. An expanding Bo Diddley shuffle with soft to loud drums and guitars ‘Out of The Woods’ grows into something altogether busier while ‘Lead Sister Blues’ with Wurlitzer piano and woodwinds is spooky and seductive like dark Carpenters.

While these are suggestive of incidental music, a further trio shout soundtrack. ‘The Hourglass Race’ smacks of espionage; an insistent kick drum groove (supposedly a Mick Fleetwood sample) with twang guitar, and synth textures. ‘Three Graves’, is all foreboding folk-horror, with mandolin providing an English rural sound; and the uptempo strings of ‘Not Of This Blood’ signal drama with a capital D.

It’s little more than a fragment, akin to the brief serialist title track, and the delicate piano melodies of ‘Daisy Stones’, and ‘I’m Going Now’. The latter is the second iteration of the Foster tune which finally emerges as itself to close the album in a fairly straight cover with piano, acoustic guitar, accordion, percussion, a duetting female voice, and last fade before a final piano coda indicating any conclusion is no more than provisional.. – Nick West / Bucketfull of Brains UK

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