It's the Vinyl Countdown: #5 "Confidenza" by Thom Yorke
Counting down my five favorite records released in 2024
Don’t roll your eyes.
A Thom Yorke film score? Thom Yorke! Are you kidding me, Janeen? Your bias is showing.
Good feedback. I am holding space for it. However, I shall counter with this.
The Vinyl Countdown Top Five is not a “Best of” for 2024. This is by design. I have limited resources available by which to purchase vinyl each year (I set a budget like a grown up and everything), and of all the vinyl I picked up, only a small percentage of that was music was released this year.
And that right there is the conceit of the list.
All contenders for the final five must be released this year. Now, many fantastic records were released in 2024. Perhaps you’re screaming the name of one at the screen right now? I do not own those records. (Or maybe I do? There’s still four days left of this. Let’s see if they made the list!) Only two three albums that I bought that were released in 2024 are not on this list. Beak> and their record “>>>>”, “What do we do now” by J. Mascis and The Smile’s “Cut Outs”. That’s no sleight on any of these as they are fine and awesome records. They have to be if I bought them.
That said, they did not make the list.
Music | Response is about a) Music and b) my Response to it. See what I did there? This is also by design.
Now you should hold space for that.
I am human. Humans respond in human ways. I choose to focus on thinking about the following: “How does this music make me feel?”
“You FEEL too much. And then you TALK too much about it.”
Fair point.
But. Music! What a gift we are given by those who can give it to us. Let us receive their gifts openly and react honestly as to how we are affected by it.
Listen with attention and intention and then assess: For me. Or not for me.
These are your only choices when listening to music.
At this point—if you’ve read this far—you’re saying: “Well get on with it!”
Sadly, I have one more piece of setup as to why this particular album made it to the Top 5.
There are tracks on this record that I love. That’s not why it made the list.
This record was made by Thom Yorke. “You’d buy anything with Thom Yorke’s name on it.” My wallet holds space for that, but that’s not why it made the list.
Film scores. Soundtracks. That’s why it made the list. Listening to “Confidenza” this past week while reviewing my purchases from 2024 sent me down a film score/soundtrack rabbit hole of thought and contemplation.
What an incredible skill it is to craft a film score. What wizardry. Music is business sure, but songs for a band have a different purpose than songs for a score. Songs for a score answer a specific brief. They are to be of service to a work that exists outside of it. They can enhance it and yet can also stand alone.
Soundtracks or scores are, in a sense, another actor in the film.
In listening to “Confidenza,” I asked myself: what is the role of a soundtrack? What should a score do? The best of them provide an extra layer of emotional context to what you’re watching. They manipulate you across the human emotional landscape, sending you toward Anxiety Canyon, Fear Ridge, or the Triumph Plains (just to name a few tourist POIs).
Scores paint in an extra layer of feeling onto the canvas.
Think of the brooding grind of that VW up the mountain at the start of The Shining. Big. Booming. Marching toward… something that feels unknown and let’s face it, terrifying.
Don’t worry, I’m not going to start listing film scenes, but film score design—the choices, the compositional manipulations of scene and point of view, the SKILL of names like John Williams, Ennio Morricone, or Hans Zimmer—my god. To be that good at something, to be so in command of your trade, must feel incredible.
Sometimes people don’t know how to feel. Music can guide the way. And that’s the job of a film score.
To be clear, I don’t put Thom Yorke up there with those names, but I love that he’s dabbling in this field. Stretching his legs. This is his second film score effort, “Suspiria” being the first, and I figured rather than simply calling out the pieces from it that tickled me, I’d use this as an opportunity to see how good it is at telling a story as a stand-alone piece.
Bearing in mind…
I have not seen the film “Confidenza.” I will probably never see the film “Confidenza.” I have not watched the trailer for the film “Confidenza.” I do not know a single thing about “Confidenza.”
What is this film about? Is it a comedy? Is it a drama? Is it horror or SciFi?
Doesn’t matter.
Today, I’m going to guess what the film “Confidenza” is about based entirely on listening to the Thom Yorke score. I will treat the order of the track listing as the flow of the movie, even though I’m guessing it does not run in this order in the film. That’s not the point. The only other clue I will use is the name of each track.
Music. Response.
Put your headphones on, cue up song one, close your eyes, pull your theatre of the mind’s curtain back, and LET’S GO!
Side A: Track 1. Right out the gate and I am on the moors at night. Maybe? It is foggy and cold. I am walking in the foggy and cold sogginess. I am alone. There is the sense of things skittering about at the edge of darkness, just out of view. The pluck pluck pluck is my footsteps. Hmm.
There’s a deception to this opening salvo. It feels pleasant but is unsettling in that it also makes me feel as though I am being set up. I am as an innocent lamb, about to enter a place that is filled with swinging knives.
The moors. Or maybe I’m in the woods? Or walking along a sandy path on a coastal cliff, heading toward a house high on the bluffs?1
Moors, coastal cliffs—wherever I am, I am creeping into the story with a curious heart. All those little glitches in this piece are either representative of the danger itself present at the periphery, or perhaps my inner voice trying to break through, urging me to go back.
The tone of the piece changes. Foreboding. Something is coming. The sense of opening a curtain to enter a scene without knowing what’s behind it. What will we find? What are we about to stumble into?
This track is called “The Big City”. Hmm. Ok, maybe not the moors. We’re walking the streets of Manhattan in the fall. Instead of opening a curtain, we are entering a subway, going down stairs into the darkened void, entering the pit.
Blindly curious, we enter the tension of this moment.
We slip into Side A: Track 2 and Thom sings. Confession: I almost wish he didn’t sing on this because I enjoy his instrumental and orchestral explorations so much, that the sudden appearance of his voice kind of takes me out of it. But I love Thom singing so I will allow it. Its presence probably helps to sell soundtracks, too.
And so, he sings. It is a bit plaintive in tone. But there is also an undercurrent of emotional menace present. These are red-flag lyrics to me, so my initial thoughts on the theme of the film is that it’s perhaps a love-gone-wrong-about-to-be-disastrous-going-wronger movie. Heartbreak, perhaps?
There Will be Tears?
The lyrics or delivered by a character (protagonist or antagonist is unclear), who is somewhat concerned about a second character, (whom they are speaking to directly), breaking their heart. It’s a ‘don’t play with me or my feelings because I WILL NOT SURVIVE if you do’ kinda vibe. Ominous. It feels a little threatening. Life and death. Stalker-vibes much? And then the line about: “If I were you, I’d run away.” Red flag. Red flag!
But hey, at least they’re upfront about it.
This track is called “Knife edge” which is what I guess this character—assuming this is the POV of an actual character in the movie—is on. A knife edge.
Deceit, unfaithful, emotional violence, and some wrenching of the heart to squeeze out all the emotion like water from a sponge. With both hands. That’s where my head is at so far.
First blush: It’s an infidelity movie.
The next two tracks are what I will call from this point forward bagel scenes, which is just a fun name I created for background filler tracks. Patch connectors. When I say bagel, I imagine a bagel falling in slow motion from a kitchen bench. The music that accompanies will indicate the mood of the bagel as it falls.
For Side A: Track 3, “Letting Down Gently” as the bagel falls it has the thought “I’m like a cloud! Dreamy. I love this for me!”
Side A: Track 4, “Secret Clarinet”, bagel says: “Oh, wait. I’m falling to my death. My mistake.”
We arrive at Side A: Track 5, “In the Trees.” It is ominous and has a Gregoirain chant-vibe. Unsettling. My acid reflux is a-gurgling. Doom is perhaps just around the corner and this scene is probably, I suspect, us watching someone do a crime.
We are forced to watch.
I’m still thinking this is deception-themed film at this point. A gripping and intriguing drama. Someone doing a morally shitty thing.
Next up and we’re straight into one of my favorite tracks on this whole record, Side A, Track 6. I adore this one. But…
It throws off my ‘It’s about an affair’ guess. The feel of this one is sneaky sneak, covert operations going down. It’s the kind of music you’d put under a scene of someone making a discovery, PI style, in a darkened office filled with mahogany. Rifling through files in a cabinet. Opening drawers and finding a gun. What if it’s a film about corporate greed?! Nefarious business practices being revealed?
Or…
Is it a caper film? This is caper music!
Or….
Scoping out a bank for a heist?
Or…
Is someone tailing someone else around a city in a car? OK, we’re back. Following the affair in progress. Taking photos of the betrayal to gather evidence. Yeah, they went to this hotel. Yeah, they were in there A LONG TIME. Snap snap snap.
Sneaky sneak. I love this. It’s called “Prize Giving.” Maybe the prize is finding the evidence. Either way, I’m guessing this discovery means it’s not going to end well, which I think we’ve known all along.
[Turns record over]
The optimism and intrigue of the last track on Side A is torn to shreds by the opener on Side B as we take a cello straight to heart with “Four Ways in Time.” Thom sings on two tracks on this album and this is the second.
It’s not for me in terms of being a stand-alone Thom track, but I will say it builds into something that sets a specific tone. A sort of medieval tone I quite enjoy. Is medieval the right word? Slogging through mud in a rainy village square, looking miserable. That might just be the emotion of it.
There’s a movement to it that sets up a crushing and mournful dread. Lyrically, the “If I ever get out” makes me think if it as a call-back to they lyric “Get out while you can” from Side A: Track 2. Makes me think it hasn’t gone well. The love gone wrong is going wronger.
“Be an everyday object. Be a robot.”
This is someone trying not to cause trouble in a relationship. I don’t know what the “Four Ways in Time” of the title means. Perhaps a four-way option of choice?
Side B: Track 2 is the title track, “Confidenza.”
Bagel falls in pleasant dream, realizing just before it hits the ground that it’s covered in spiders and all the legs of all the spiders are tap dancing.
I love the start of “Nosebleed Nuptials” (Side B: Track 3)—all New Orleans Jazz Funeral-ish feel—and the name backs up that feeling a little. Some kind of fight, physical or verbal, and we’re thrown back into that death of love theme pit.
As much as I love the start of it, the song switches after about a minute into something more reflective, then switches again, veering off into some very unsettling string arrangements. Sudden palpitations and punctuations before it descends into an ears-blocked sensation.
You feel underwater here. You are listening to things without being able to hear things. You cannot pop your ears to clear. It’s very discombobulating to the senses.
I have no idea what’s happening in this film at this point, but I can tell you this: Things are not going well.
Side B, Track 4: “Bunch of flowers.” Confused bagel.
Side B, Track 5: “A Silent Scream” Bagel contemplates life and finds it upsetting.
And now we have arrived at the last track on the album. This does not feel like a credits-rolling, leaving the theatre kind of piece, which makes me think that the track listing does indeed not reflect the order these songs appear in the film.
That said, Side B, Track 6: “On the Ledge” = bagel has realization it was pushed. This track is a discombobulated everything on the floor what a whole damn mess kind of album closer.
Oh! Maybe that’s the message! Maybe it IS the credits roller?
What a mess love is. What a mess. Movie ends. Please deposit your popcorn bucket in the bin on your way out.
Time to take my shot. Guessing what a film’s about based entirely on the soundtrack/score leaves me to theorize that “Confidenza” is probably a drama, perhaps even a thriller based on the tense emotional pull of a couple of tracks in the middle there, and deals with love gone wrong and wrong in a way that’s probably an affair.
There’s some cheating on.
Nobody gets off unscathed.
Someone might even be dead.
I don’t know how close this is to the truth, but that’s the story it told to me via my ears.
Do I think this is an Album of the Year contender? No. Did I enjoy it? Very much. And that’s why it made the list. It really made me listen intently to each track and pay attention to how it was making me feel in the moment. Do I feel anxious? Do I feel happy? Do I feel scared? How to you feel, Janeen?!
Emotion set in wax.
There are tracks on it I would skip 100%, but The Big City, Knife Edge, and Prize Giving are all in my favs list, and I put the whole damn album on my Music to Write by playlist.
Does it succeed in the job of a soundtrack? Does it convey the tone of the movie “Confidenza”? I don’t know. It’s impossible to say, since I haven’t seen the film,2 but to judge it on a success metric of setting a tone, creating emotion and manipulating a human, Thom Yorke understood the assignment.
Extra
Fun fact: I have never seen the movie Tron: Legacy. It is one of my favorite soundtracks ever and if I ever see it on vinyl for a reasonable price, it shall be mine. Highlights: “Disc Wars,” “Recognizer,” and “The Game has Changed.”
FINAL It’s the Vinyl Countdown List
In case you missed any, catch up on your reading and listening.
#5: “Confidenza” soundtrack by Thom Yorke
#4: “Romance” by Fontaines D.C.
#3: “A Dream is All We Know” by The Lemon Twigs
#2: “Mahashmashana” by Father John Misty
#1: TIE “Wall of Eyes” by The Smile and “TANGK” by IDLES
Here is a playlist of all these records
After writing this, I looked at the cover art, which it turns out was painted by Thom. General vibe met. When I get new vinyl, I immediately put the record in an archive sleeve and slot it in back of the record itself, which I also put in a plastic cover. This means I don’t usually see the back cover of a record. I looked. Two faces all close and intimate. I think it’s a sexy love story with intrigue and some bad behavior. And now I think the next phase of this experiment would be to watch it and see how much of it I got right and see where the different tracks appear.
I won’t be upset if you spoil it and tell me what it’s actually about. I could google it, but I won’t.