"Four Studies for a Human Portrait: Tribute to Francis Bacon"

As tribute albums go, one dedicated to a painter is not something I’ve encountered before. Being a fan of Francis Bacon, I was very excited to hear this album but alas half of it is useless. The other half though is great although only one of the four tracks really nails the feeling that I get from looking at one of Bacon’s paintings.

 

Vital

Oddly, for a tribute to a visual artist with each track being devoted to one of his paintings, there are no pictures of the paintings included with the album, just details of where to find them online. A couple of them I wasn’t familiar with so I had to search for them (and to save you the bother I’ve linked to all of them). The imagery that does appear on the sleeve is a very shallow representation of Bacon’s work. Photos of what looks like liver being pulled apart on a stainless steel surface doesn’t do any justice at all to Bacon’s visceral and hallucinogenic creations. A far better option would have been to include reproductions of the paintings themselves.

Musically the album starts off poor and gets better. Henrik Nordvargr Björkk’s tribute to “Portrait of a Cardinal (1955)” starts off very ropey, completely missing the drama of the painting. It does eventually synch up with the stark, dark imagery of the painting but too often it lapses into boring “eerie” soundscapes. Most annoyingly it sounds like it is just cut off at the end, like Björkk couldn’t be bothered to finish off properly. Contagious Orgasm’s homage to “Fragment of a Crucifixion (1950)” is a better attempt at capturing Bacon in sound but it still doesn’t go all the way. The beginning of the piece (a juxtaposition of normal day to day noises with stomach churning wet, meaty noises and distant voices that could be in pain or in pleasure) is a great audio representation of the painting. About three minutes in there is a rapid shift in style with some cheesy horror soundtrack music which kills the mood entirely. Bacon deals in cold, stony drama not in melodrama. When the cheap horror music stops the previously creepy sounds become completely ineffective; a shame as the piece started off so promisingly.

Hentai’s interpretation of “Painting (1946)” is more like what Bacon’s thoughts might sound like. For the first few minutes it is nothing special; the sound of rotating machinery mainly but then there is an almighty explosion of noises that perfectly sums up the cacophony of hellish imagery that Bacon employs in his piece. Lasse Marhaug’s “Figure in Movement (1978)” is a good piece on its own but I don’t think it fits well with the fluid moving figure in Bacon’s painting. The stop/start jerkiness of the music is totally at odds with the liquid motion of the visuals. I do like the music though but I think it would be better suited to one of Bacon’s other paintings (like the “Portrait of a Cardinal” mentioned earlier).

It’s a good concept for a compilation and a worthy artist to pay tribute to but unfortunately Four Studies for a Human Portrait isn’t as good as it could have been. I really like the last two pieces included but I’d hesitate to recommend the album on that basis as the first two pieces are so disappointing. However, for anyone with an interest in Francis Bacon, this is worth checking out just to see what other people think the paintings sound like.

samples:

• Henrik Nordvargr Björkk - Portrait of a Cardinal (1955)
• Contagious Orgasm - Fragment of a Crucifixion (1950)
• Hentai - Painting (1946)