'Faust' by Mahogany Frog
Silent movies were seldom presented silently. They were accompanied by pianists, organists, combos and at the big movie palaces, pit orchestras. Since the ‘70s a vogue has grown for presenting silent classics with freshly composed scores. By lifting them from the ticky-tacky stereotype of tinny pianos, those old films are placed in new, contemporary contexts.
Perhaps the trend was launched, a bit egregiously, with a 1984 soundtrack for the rerelease of Metropolis (1927) featuring Pat Benatar, Loverboy and other radio acts of that moment. Since then, the Alloy Orchestra has dominated the field with exemplary scores for Phantom of the Opera, Buston Keaton’s The General and others that somehow sound timeless, their listenable avant-garde approach sounding neither anachronistic nor imprisoned in the 1920s.
With their new album, Faust, the Canadian band Mahogany Frog release their vision for the 1925 film of that name. Director F.W. Murnau drew from the same lore that inspired Goethe’s stage play but told his own version of the story. Murnau’s Faust might have special resonance today given its theme of a deadly plague that spreads like dark smoke across a city. Faust works feverishly but unsuccessfully to find a cure until Mephistopheles appears and offers the power to heal—on a one-day trial plan! If Faust likes the feeling, he can sign up for a lifetime of power and glory, even regaining his lost youth. Of course, there is that pact in blood …
Mahogany Frog’s music for Faust is nothing less than a symphony of varied moods and motifs. The album opens with the doleful toiling of bells before a furious cacophony of metallic guitars shreds the sky, settling into sinister chords that coalesce into a heavy Sabbath-like riff before settling into the electrical hum that anticipates events about to occur. Organ and electronic effects provide a contrast between between classical-based composition and soundscapes as roiling rock drums signal emotional, even cosmic turmoil.
And yes, in Mahogany Frog—as in Murnau and Goethe—there is a love story, a tragedy. Their Faust is prog rock that accurately renders the alternately somber, hyperbolic emotions of Murnau’s film.
Mahogany Frog’s Faust is released on MoonJune Records.
