On its face, “Goodbye Horses” shouldn’t stand apart from countless comparable synth-pop songs from the same period: There’s the reliable snap and kick of a drum machine, the familiar oscillating hum of a buzzing bassline, the rubbery plinks of a wobbling keyboard melody. But then there’s Q, who we first hear as a whispery, wordless coo and then as a rich and velvety-smooth vocal. There’s a destabilizing dichotomy in her voice, which is capable of harmonizing with both the squirming synths and the low thrum of the bass. The tension between her featherlight falsetto and the depth at the lower end of her range creates an unshakable sense of unease. Small eccentricities—the growl when she sings, “I see my hopes and dreams lying on the ground,” the pleading yelp when she cries out, “Oh no sir”—further stymie attempts to categorize her chameleonic voice.
The songs included on the film’s soundtrack do little to contain or classify the mysterious vocalist, instead offering expanded parallel universes that trace Luckey’s journey from Pyramid Club crooner to glam-rock frontwoman and back again. On “Heaven,” which Q performed live for Demme’s 1993 AIDS drama Philadelphia (but which was excluded from the film’s official soundtrack), she sings in a textured howl about the afterlife, imagined as a bar where “everyone will leave at exactly the same time.” Then there’s the glittering new wave of “A Fools Life” and the swaggering dub cover of George Gershwin’s “Summertime,” which feel indebted to her years spent pounding the pavement in London. I keep returning to “My Mistake,” a bubbly house track led by the digital sheen of a Korg M1 synthesizer. As she belts out, “You lead me on!,” it’s hard not to imagine an alternate world where Q found the one-off dance floor success of, say, Robin S. or Crystal Waters. Instead, it’s an untold chapter we only get to experience in retrospect, a could-have-been and never-was.
Though the vinyl edition of Goodbye Horses contains only 10 songs, two of which are different versions of its lead single, the CD and streaming versions of the soundtrack include a dozen more demos, all similarly striking in their heartbreaking mix of pop production, disquieting lyrics, and Q’s indelible voice. On the depressingly named “Fathers, Mothers, and Children Are Dying in the Street,” her voice recalls Danzig’s mournful wail, a blues singer who somehow found herself in a different genre but took all of the tortured agony with her. Her voice is the unifying force, even as it contorts into unlikely arrangements: The glam epic “Momma Never Said” opens with a gnarled incantation that could accurately be described as Animal meets Roy Orbison; “Take the Time” layers vocal harmonies until they recall the breeze passing through a windchime; the electro thump of “The Time Is Right (Dare)” uses her voice as percussion, her opening cries of “Beat it!” punctuating its laser-beam synths. You could listen to the extended soundtrack 10 times and walk away with 10 impressions of Q, while the full extent of her creative range remains out of reach.
