The thing about soundtracks that are heard devoid of their visual correlate is always complicated. Do they stand on their own even if you haven’t seen the movie? Do they deserve the treatment of autonomous parts? Do we relegate them to the section of beautiful rarities within the canon of their authors or can they aspire to be tops of their discographies? would someone put “Selmasongs” (2000) at the height of “Debut” (1993), as much as we like it?
All this comes to mind while listening “Sky full of alien ships” (2023), an unusual job – they admit it themselves, of course – for what they are used to Hidrogenesse. There are no texts (except in the “Voice note” end), there are no burning choruses, there is no tangible humor (although it may underlie it), there is hardly any light because what it is about is putting music to “The alarm” (2022), the contribution of Nacho Vigalondo to the remakes of “Stories to not sleep”: a 52-minute story starring Aníbal Gómez, Roberto Álamo, Carlos Areces or Javier Gurruchaga, giving life to two families who don’t know each other and are confined to a house due to an ambiguous external threat, nothing less than an alien invasion.
The assignment was that Hidrogenesse they produced gloomy music, essentially malrrollera, also as a way of counteracting the histrionics of some actors prone to excess, and there it can be said that the commitment of Genís and Carlos is beyond reproach: their twelve tracks exude a dystopian science fiction setting, sometimes more cerebral (“Alarm Clock” o “Melodic Mechanism”, which can be somewhat reminiscent of Kraftwerk or Warp’s electronic school, respectively) and other more spectral ones, such as in “Ball of confusion” (nothing to do with him) “Ball of Confusion” of the Temptations) or in “Overflow of the real”, which reminds me of some of the latest works by Joaquín Pascual in his application of vintage keyboards to evoke a certain transcendence. To which we were going: Is it pleasantly heard by itself? Well, that depends on the moment, of course.