Emil Amos: Zone Black

An album review of multi-instrumentalist/one-man-band genius Emil Amos, and his latest creations…

Emil Amos

Zone Black

Drag City

Zone Black started life as “library music”, you know the sorts of generic film/advertising/TV cues that sit in a vault and get used for licence-free work, or cheap gigs where the production cannot afford to pay a whole heap for music clearance. There’s been a boom in such things, ever since it started turning up in the work of DJ Shadow and MF Doom, influencing the world of J Dilla and the like. There are some bangers about, some gold in them there hills!

So that’s first up.

But secondly, Emil Amos is a wunderkind — he works under the name Holy Sons, where he’s amassed around about a thousand original songs, apparently. He also plays drums for stoner/doom legends, Om, and was the drummer who played guitar and sang in the band Grails too. Quite the talent.

Here he takes his aborted library music project and releases it as solo album, a baker’s dozen of instrumental mood music gems that feel like late-night reverie and clearly come from the influence of John Carpenter and Tangerine Dream and the more recent offshoots of that, such as the Oneohtrix Point Never/Daniel Lopatin film scores (Uncut Gems, Good Time) The Newton Brothers (Doctor Sleep, Midnight Mass) and of course, and maybe most overtly, Kyle Dixon and Michael Stein (Stranger Things). But you’ll also hear late night wafts of 80s sax that might not have been out of place on something by Vangelis (Blade Runner) or for that matter Mark Knopfler (Local Hero). And some of Trevor Jones’ great 80s scores leap to mind too.

It all feels, ultimately, like a beat-less version of something DJ Shadow could cook up, in terms of its dreamy, wafty, late-night drive kind of style. And though, outside of the world of soundtrack heads, this could be a hard sell, and if you didn’t already know Amos, an even harder sell, for those worthy to take a punt, or keen on what they’ve heard here, I feel like this is one of the best things I’ve discovered in recent times. Huge recommend!