REVIEW · Songs & Albums
Bear McCreary’s “Something Dark Is Coming”: The Weight of an Event Yet to Arrive
Bear McCreary’s “Something Dark Is Coming” names the state of awaiting an event before the event itself. Something is approaching, but its identity remains unknown. Even when recalling the crises of Battlestar Galactica, the music need not be narrowed to a signal for one enemy’s entrance. At its center are the body’s vigilance before confirming a threat and a sense of another current moving beneath an apparently peaceful surface. Foreboding grows less in a loud moment than in the expectation that moment will come.
Something Dark Is Coming
Waiting without knowing what approaches
The title’s first word, withholding identity, changes how we listen. Without a definite face for the threat, the ear treats small changes as clues. Instead of growing reassured by repetition, we await what will be added behind it. The tension of recurring low tones can be connected to this anticipation. Rather than explaining danger like dialogue, the music makes listeners predict the next event themselves. Something not yet happened occupies present sensation.
Attending to the recurring low movement gives the darkness a more concrete form than vague atmosphere. A maintained floor makes changes above it feel heavier. Repetition creates seemingly halted time while preserving a sense of advance. Inescapable anxiety overlaps with the pace of an approaching event on one level. Tension is not determined by loudness alone; it also emerges from the ear comparing what remains with what changes.
The persistence made by low repetition
In his account of working on The Plan, McCreary explains that he played this piece’s bass melody again while finding a place for it in a later scene. That account prevents hearing the original only as effective horror background. A recognizable musical shape, not merely atmosphere, survived into another context. Sound supporting one scene’s feelings later becomes a memory cue recalling an earlier story. A repeated melody can connect works as well as generate tension within a piece.
Such a shape becomes more important when hearing a soundtrack without images: sound changes alone must convey danger previously signaled by expressions and editing. Yet there is no need to invent and match a particular scene’s plot. The relation between the title’s anticipation and the continuing repetition is enough to experience a flow. Each return of the low tones lets us ask whether the initial foreboding remains unchanged or has gained weight from intervening sound, revealing how tension accumulates.
An anticipation lasting longer than the event
The anxiety of “Something Dark Is Coming” does not entirely resolve upon discovering what arrived. Preparing for the next thing leaves a state of not fully trusting the present within the music. On returning, attend to the low repetition prompting anticipation instead of waiting only for the strongest passage. Shock after an event and pressure before it are different experiences. This music holds the latter, continuing the title’s present progressive in sound.
