The Night Ghost by Feelings Eraser, released in July of this year, is the soundtrack to a 1980s crime thriller starring James Caan that does not exist. But it should. These 12 tracks, composed primarily with a Roland HS-60 synthesizer and “designed to play with the windows down, alone, on the long way home,” capture the beloved ridiculousness and campiness that was the ’80s, that over-the-top decade of film, fashion and music that you love to hate and hate to love. And The Night Ghost, which sounds like something Nic Cage would be all over, provokes some thought about the narrative power of tone and timbre.
And James Caan is trumped by no one, except maybe Harrison Ford.
Open scene with “The Bus.” With its nervous, uncomfortable pitch, it at first sounds more like a Daniel Craig thing, almost The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo, but then cue the heavy drum and we plunge into the heart of the ’80s with an aerial shot of a dismal city, we’ll say Pittsburgh, getting drizzled on by the foreboding clouds of what’s to come.
Next comes “The Venue,” rife with bad hair and coke, where two men stare at one another from across a glass table. Their faces are stoic, basked in a red glow, and neither acknowledges the crotch full of singles dancing up next to them.
In “The Getaway,” neon lights flash and you get to see the whole of Pittsburgh in a frenzy of rushing cars, sirens, neon lights and hookers jumping out of the way before it all comes to a crashing halt when the culprit’s vehicle goes careening over a highway bridge. Everything’s on fire, Caan is somehow unscathed and everybody’s got to clean all this shit up.
It’s finally over in “The Dream.” Caan is home, in his bachelor pad, in bed drifting off when it hits him —some offhand remark heard a week ago becomes significant, and he realizes his partner Jerry, loveable Jerry who’s had his back for years, Jerry, whose wife Margaret sends him a Christmas card every year, is a double-crossing bastard.
Caan is off to save the woman he’s going to bed later, find the $500 million and take care of Jerry in “The Castle,” and this will take cunning.
By the time we get to “After,” James Caan is spent. He makes a wry joke, saying his vacation is long overdue, and the movie closes with a salve, but not a total resolution, and so the stage is set for The Night Ghost 2, hopefully with Harrison Ford in it.
Find The Night Ghost by Feelings Eraser at feelingseraser.bandcamp.com.
