I Found A Monster by Seth Schaeffer does not enter the scene in a polite manner - it breaks down the silence. The introductory sound resembles a flash in a dark and the one that makes you blink and take a breath and in this moment you are drawn into the world that is cinematic, bruised, and very personal. You are instantly made aware that it is being told by someone who knows how to tell a storey not merely as a film-maker or composer but as a man who has experienced something heavy, and now is courageous enough to take it to the light. All the sounds are deliberate, as he is scoring the moment he ceases to run away in his own shadow.
The beat of the piece is his voice. It shudders, extends, breaks open. It has power in it, but there is weakness, the weakness of being naked instead of acting. You hear fear stroking against rebel, then yielding to liberation. The delivery is raw and nearly fragile urgency that fades the world around you. It is as though someone has finally looked back at the aspects of themselves that they once buried and once you listen to it, you cannot but feel that reckoning ringing in your ears as well. He doesn't sing to impress. He sings to tell the truth.
The music is like a moving being. Guitars are swelling and grinding under the surface, impatient, pained, the orchestra heaving and sinking in huge, rolling swells. Brass slices through the darkness like lightning flashes, and the strings are gleaming with suppressed melancholy, gliding in and out like memories that you are unable to retain. It is expansive, almost film-like, but remains close, personal, so that you can feel it nest in your chest. A gorgeous tension there - chaotic is maintained by repression.
It is what you remember most about it, the change it brings. I Found A Monster is not just a storey of overcoming the fear, but taking it, learning to hold that monster as power instead of being ashamed of it. There are echoes of influences of Schaeffer there, the grandeur of scale of Hans Zimmer, the discomfort and sharpness of Trent Reznor, but the voice in the middle belongs to him. The song is stretched beyond the structure and becomes liberation with Emily Hatch ghostlike harmonies and those piercing trumpet lines. A confrontation. A letting go.
The silence is charged when it comes to its end. You are sitting there with your heart still racing and you know that something honest has just gone through you. I Found A Monster does not merely address you, but it listens, and silently pulls something actual to the surface. That's what great music does. It makes you open your eyes, it makes you jump and it reminds you that you are still a human, all the noise notwithstanding.
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