If Emerald Fennell’s talent as a filmmaker is her capacity to transmute excess—of the emotional, psychosexual, and socioeconomic variety—into an unshakeable visual language, then Charli XCX was a natural choice to helm the soundtrack for the director’s Wuthering Heights. The album sonically mirrors the film’s penchant for bodice-ripping bombast and grief while standing on its own. It’s often loud and discordant, filled with droning synths and screeching strings that underlie Charli’s digitally manipulated vocals. And yet, somehow the album manages to be as startling and satisfying as a clandestine carriage-house hook-up.
These 12 songs could be loosely divided into three camps: the gothic, the aching, and the anthemic. The John Cale-assisted opener, “House,” is a witchy, cello-laden darkwave concoction that wouldn’t feel out of place on an Ethel Cain album. On the somber “Always Everywhere,” Charli’s voice seems to fade under the weight of the chorus’s roaring symphony, as if she were being pulled into an unknown realm. And on “Dying for You,” the most pure pop track here, a rollicking kick drum and snare evokes the image of someone running through the moors toward—or, perhaps, away from—the one person they can’t live without.
Many of the album’s highlights spring from the production styles crashing up against or bleeding into one another. “Chains of Love” is a sweeping ballad that recalls the irresistible ’80s-inspired synth-pop of Charli’s debut True Romance. “Eyes of the World” is a grungy duet with Sky Ferreira that benefits from both singers’ natural rasp riding along the growling orchestration. The album’s strings, arranged by Gareth Murphy, prove a welcome addition to Charli’s usual soundscape, bringing a wry grandeur to her hyper-pop instincts that anachronizes and cinematizes her music a la early Lana del Rey.
Still, one can’t help but feel that the project falls just short of the gleeful histrionics that both the novel and Fennell’s adaptation beg for. The pop structures circumscribe otherwise promising songs like “Seeing Things” and “Altars” to a place that don’t quite capture the feral, wicked spirit of Emily Brontë’s prose. At other times, Charli’s lyrics don’t truly vivify the two doomed lovers’ semi-supernatural connection as much as they merely retrace its trajectory: The literalness of lines like “You’re always my reminder/Of where I started from,” for example, stultify the potential for catharsis of “My Reminder.”
Unlike, say, Kate Bush’s “Wuthering Heights,” Charli doesn’t write from either Cathy or Heathcliff’s specific perspective until closer “Funny Mouth,” when it’s too little, too late. Rather, she embodies both characters’ tireless yearning throughout. It’s implied in both the film and novel that the characters share a soul, but the soundtrack misses the opportunity to express the distinct ways that they pine for one another—Cathy forlornly, Heathcliff ruefully—and therefore offer a more thematically penetrating account of this storied love affair.
But these are minor quibbles on an otherwise delectable pop album and a worthy companion piece to Fennell’s audacious film. The interlude “Open Up” is the most romantic and devastating track on the album, as Charli’s ghostly voice seems to moan in agonized heat over lush, shimmering waves of synths and strings. In less than 90 seconds, it nearly wordlessly evokes the fatalistic heartache forever embedded in the rock walls of Wuthering Heights—the kind of tragedy that feels both timeless and as pressing as ever.
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