REVIEW // ALIEN: EARTH (ORIGINAL SOUNDTRACK)

RATING: 10/10

By Patrick Greene (Co-host, Perfect Organism: The Alien Saga Podcast)

It’s a tough thing, writing an Alien score.

For one, a composer has to make their music feel simultaneously familiar—unmistakably “Alien”—while also original and non-derivative. Ask a Star Wars fan what those films sound like and they’ll hum one of a handful of themes familiar to generations of movie fans around the world. Maybe a really canny one will say something like “The Star Wars films take a pseudo-Wagnerian approach to motifs, incorporating heroic brass and string flourishes that tell us pretty literal things about which character is on screen and what they are feeling in the moment.”

But what does Alien sound like? Does it sound like Jerry Goldsmith’s score for the first film, juxtaposing Old Hollywood melodies against the avant-garde? Does it sound like James Horner’s thrilling action cues, with snappy percussion and motoric rhythms? Or does it sound like Elliot Goldenthal’s expressionistic contemporary-classical treatment for Alien 3?

In the decades since, we’ve seen composers wrestling with this question in different ways. John Frizzell gave us some lovely but overall generic music for Alien: Resurrection; Marc Streitenfeld (with some help from Harry Gregson-Williams) gave us some Romantic Era-tinged intrigue for Prometheus; Jed Kurzel wrote some of the best, most genuinely unsettling music in all of Alien for Alien: Covenant but dulled its impact by including lots of very unmistakable musical quotations from Goldsmith. More recently, we had Ben Wallfisch’s score for Alien: Romulus: an uneven affair that married Goldsmithian lyricism with some half-hearted synths, to varying degrees of effectiveness.

I’m laying all this out to say it’s harder to write music for these things than a casual observer might assume. I myself have scored many Alien fan projects by this point. The constant conversation during the process of coming up with Alien music is “how can I dialog with the original films without sounding like I’m copying them?”

In his marvelous score for Alien: Earth, composer Jeff Russo presents us with an intriguing answer to that very question. Russo—a frequent Hawley collaborator who came to scoring for television and film after a career as a founding member of twice-Grammy-nominated rock band Tonic—has gradually formed a reputation as a masterful musical storyteller. He first came to my attention in 2014 with his music for Hawley’s first season of Fargo. Similar to Hawley, Russo has a real knack for investigating why source material is affecting, and then writing to that instead of trying to recreate something.

Fargo, unlike Alien, does have a central musical motif: a chilly melody by Carter Burwell based on the Norwegian folk song "Den bortkomne sauen,” or “The Lost Sheep.” For Hawley’s television show, Russo deconstructed and recontextualized this theme, using its musical characteristics—the harmonic minor scale, the 2+2 measure phrase length, the relative-major material offering a moment of hope amidst the snowy minor melody—and wrote much of his score off the backbone of those characteristics.

In Alien: Earth, Russo manages to pull off the same cohesion even though Alien itself doesn’t have a central title-card “theme song.” Russo chose to put the track “Zaveri” first on the official score release, which might seem a bit of an odd choice: Zaveri herself is a decidedly minor character, at least in the first two episodes released on premiere night. Her theme, though, shows up in quite a few places in just the first two episodes alone—the most unmistakable being during the “transference of consciousness” in Episode One (‘Neverland’) as Marcy (or perhaps a simulacrum of her?) is being uploaded into Wendy’s body.

I asked Jeff about this, and he said he’ll sometimes write a cue for one character that eventually starts to feel like it might be about more than just that one character’s experience. Listening to the remaining ninety minutes or so of the OST, I can very much understand what he’s talking about.

So let’s talk a little about the elements that make “Zaveri” sort of a template for the sound world that Alien: Earth goes on to inhabit. (MUSIC THEORY ALERT) After about thirty seconds of spooky scene-setting, we get a haunting, slow, stately melodic progression in G minor. This chord progression is a dead-standard one (i - VI - i 6/4 - V), but between the i and the VI we have an E-natural peering through like a ray of sunlight. Borrowed from the Dorian scale, this raised sixth scale degree feels like a fleeting moment of hope, or maybe a bittersweet tinge of nostalgia, which then resolves downward to the Eb which one would expect in this scale—although that chord, too, is major, being the normal submediant of a G-minor scale.

This Eb then gives way to the dominant D major we’re expecting, passing briefly through a second-inversion G-minor chord for a nice ‘n tidy cadence.

So why am I laying all this out? Because within this important theme—a theme that sounds unmistakably minor key and “sad”—almost all of the chords are actually major! And that simple but effective harmonic trick gives “Zaveri” a sense of mournfulness: a feeling that something has been lost. The memory of happiness is there, but every four measures it recycles back into the reality that something dark is happening. Set to the rhythm of a pavane, Zaveri’s theme feels like a slow dance inside a haunted castle. A dance for ghosts.

And overall, that’s the mood I feel Russo most eloquently captures throughout the rest of the score. Alien: Earth absolutely “sounds” like Alien, Aliens, and even Alien 3 at times. An especially clear example is the track “Alien - Earth,” which begins with a chilly unaccompanied string melody that very nearly quotes James Horner’s work for Cameron’s film. And in case we missed it, “Alien - Earth Pt. 2” makes it unmistakable. That cue starts with the high strings playing D-C#-D-C-D-B-D; compare that to Horner’s “Aliens Main Title” at 1:04, where you’ll also hear D-C#-D-C-D-B-D, played at almost the same tempo and in the same manner.

Luckily Russo goes right back to giving us original sounds again, and the score is at its best when it’s singing its own tune. A wonderful early example of this is the track “Weyland-Yutani,” which prominently features the shakuhachi. I can’t think of another moment in Alien history that’s featured this iconic Japanese bamboo flute before, and it brings such wonderful color and variety to its various appearances in Alien: Earth’s score. “Weyland-Yutani” is full of colorful orchestration: in addition to the shakuhachi, I hear glockenspiel, dulcimer, and harp … gorgeous and layered and ravishing sounds. Listen to that particular track with a good pair of headphones and tell me you aren’t swept off your feet.

The most thoroughly original music in this entire score is actually music that would probably be the most traditional in many other contexts: layered multitracked electric guitars in “Procession.” A haunting (there’s that word again) backdrop of fingerstyle arpeggios (unmistakably reminiscent of that Zaveri music I wrote about earlier, outlining a D minor/F major progression full of mourning) accompany a straight-up lightly overdriven Telecaster (I think?) solo that dialogues with gorgeous surf reverb and effects, creating a hypnotic soundscape that one can’t help but fall into.

And I’m so thoroughly glad Russo gives us opportunities like this: real periods of reflection and patience, and actual new things to listen to. It pairs well with what Hawley is trying to do with this show: taking things we love and challenging them, dilating them, subverting them.

There are some real bangers on here, too. “Evolution” is a spanky li’l number that pairs dirty synths with brass trills and glissandi, and I dare you not to bop to it.

“Big Ass Bug” features prominent use of one of Goldsmith’s most iconic Alien techniques: a stereo-panned delay. Here it’s summoned lovingly, without feeling like a slavish remake of something we already know. Again, Russo does a great job of summoning ghosts and then telling new stories with them.

So why did I give Alien: Earth’s music a perfect score? I didn’t award a ten out of ten lightly. I had originally planned on awarding it 8/10, the same score we gave the pilot episode. But watching it in action on screen brought it truly to life, and I realized how inextricably tied to Hawley vision Russo’s score is. As it appears in the show, Russo’s score services the story in an authentic and non-intrusive way. It feels completely part of the same world that the television show has created, and the fact that it can feel both authentic to something truly new while still pulling off the magic trick of sounding “Alien” is an astounding achievement.

With Alien: Earth, Russo has given us a piece of work that improves the more I listen to it. It’s a score that makes me desperately want to watch the show, but it’s also a piece of music that I’d gladly listen to completely on its own (as I have many times in the past few weeks). It’s a great reminder that instead of asking “How can I write something that sounds like Alien without copying it,” we should trust that a story that speaks to Alien in layered and authentic ways can look, sound, and feel quite different, because if it’s done right it will still ultimately feel “Alien” to us.

And most important of all: it will help us expand our ideas of what Alien can be.