Secretary

AMG Review of Secretary

William Ruhlmann
All Music Guide

Composer Angelo Badalamenti, known for his work with the off-key film director David Lynch, hooks up with another oddball, Stephen Shainberg, for Secretary, and turns out another of his highly original, moody, ambient scores. The music is both gentle and faintly menacing, similar to Badalamenti's work on such Lynch efforts as Blue Velvet and Lost Highway, but a bit lighter and less haunting. Badalamenti is a minimalist who focuses on details in his slow-moving works, so that an individual plucked guitar pattern or wind-like sweep of strings, often with echo added, carries much force. The effect is to support the unusual tones of the Lynch films, as well as this one. The soundtrack album opens with Leonard Cohen's 1988 song "I'm Your Man," a statement of devotion in keeping with the film's theme, and concludes with Lizzie West's "Chariots Rise," which is reminiscent of the work of Natalie Merchant and Marianne Faithfull, and is another love song with a whiff of victimhood.