"TRON: ARES OST": It's not Trent's fault.

Sometimes there's a benefit to procrastination. Like when you can't summon the will to write about the Tron Ares soundtrack, and then the movie itself comes back as such a jaw-dropping flop that it's an apt point of comparison.

The OST to Tron: Ares is fine. That's all it is. But that's not Trent's fault.

Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross are working under the NIN name here, presumably to boost the attention the OST gets, and one might imagine the hope at Disney is that magic might have shared a little glow with the film. But the soundtrack fails for a lot of the same reasons the film does.

"Init" and "Forked Reality" begin with some pretty humdrum but serviceable synthwave, and that's roughly what Tron as a franchise demands: idealized retro-futurism that's already been grist for the mill too many times. Synthwave itself is already as moribund as another Tron movie was doomed to be. Perturbator and Dance With the Dead kind of already did everything that could be done with the genre, and Perturbator already started branching out into more promising milieus. 

That's why it's such a relief when the well-worn conventions give way to what is the most unabashedly Nine Inch Nails track, the feature number "As Alive As You Need Me To Be."

Those first three tracks take what little could still be done with the genre, maybe lightly channel the edge of Ben Frost through some pop sensibility, and move on.

After that is a bunch of serviceable film score that doesn't really work as an album, broken up by "I Know You Can Feel It," which can only be described as "We have 'Angel' by Massive Attack at home."

Toward the end, we get a reprise on the memorable tracks. "Target Identified" is a functional reprise on "As Alive As You Need Me To Be," and in terms of a soundtrack, the return to a leitmotif is great, but in the context of an album feels like even Trent has admitted the well has run dry here. "New Directive" and "Shadows Over Me" return to the leitmotifs from "Init."

It's not that the move itself or the artists are creatively bankrupt; it's a sensible move for a soundtrack, i.e., the job they hired Nine Inch Nails to do.

Maybe we can blame him for signing on the dotted line, but it's hard not to feel a little empathy for Trent, put in the unenviable position of trying to make something memorable for a doomed movie tied to a rusted, decaying aesthetic shadow of an old futurism.

(Stream it on Youtube if you must.)