various artists - Mojo Presents: It's A Wonderfull Life (A Journey Into Sound)

It only took me around 40-something years before I finally came around on what made Siouxie & The Banshees so great, so this wasn't something I would have sought out even just a few years ago.  This is just an unbelievably cool collection, curated by Siouxie Sioux and Steve Severin. You know, those two.

Primarily comprised of film and stage music, spanning the 1940s to the early 60s, and loaded with sounds you've almost certainly absorbed throughout your life, whether you're 12 or 80. C'mon, you don't have to have been a Disney kid to know "When You Wish Upon A Star" or "A Night On Bare Mountain"...but it helps. For those of us who grew up on the western side of the Atlantic, maybe we didn't get turned on to the themes from "Whiplash", "The Edgar Wallace Mystery Theatre", or "Fireball XL5". But they left indelible marks on they who did encounter them; hence their appearances here.

This is also a good introduction to Satie, Lotte Lenya, not Bernard Herrmann; not to mention Siouxie & The Banshees representing with their 1987 cover of a song from "The Jungle Book". That's why I'll be packing this off in a care package to my 11-year-old niece, who deserves to hear only the finest.

Discogs

Click here to download.

various artists - Repo Man (Music From The Original Motion Picture Soundtrack)

Tomorrow is the Iggster's 79th birthday, and to celebrate this audacious occasion a day early, I present the soundtrack to Alex Cox's 1984 classic "Repo Man". Iggy provided the eponymous title track to this soundtrack, which my cursory research tells me came in between the release of "Zombie Birdhouse" and "Blah Blah Blah", the latter of which I bought on cassette sometime in the early 90s because a girl put "Real Wild Child" on a mixtape she gave me. That was my second exposure to Iggy Pop, the first being the 10 minutes of "Repo Man" I watched on HBO when I was 10 or 11 before my mom switched it off "because punk rockers are violent." Well, I showed her; I grew up a punk.

This rip comes from the copy I found a few weeks ago in a nearby thrift store for one American dollar. That's right; I paid less than a quarter of what I would for a gallon of gasoline. Pretty sweet deal. Pretty rad movie. Pretty great soundtrack.

Discogs

Click here to download.

various artists - A Matter Of Degrees (Original Motion Picture Soundtrack)

"A Matter Of Degrees" is the second and final film directed by W.T. Morgan, who is notable for having previously directed "X: The Unheard Music". I've never seen it, probably on account of it having been released before THE YEAR PUNK BROKE, and thus being a bit of a forgotten film. It features a few A+ character actors in the form of Tom Sizemore and Wendall Pierce, with Michael Imperioli making a very early, unnamed appearance. John Doe, Kate Pierson, and Fred Schneider all show up as well, apparently. The plot revolves around a college student refusing to sell out and go to grad school, and rebelling against a corporate takeover of the college radio station. I assure the Gen Z'ers amongst my readers that, yes, this is something we were concerned about in the 90s. It actually mattered.

The soundtrack, however, is best described as "mad solid"...very representative of where the majors were fishing in the pre-Nirvana, post-Replacements college rock pond. fIREHOSE contributes an exclusive track to this soundtrack, as do Yo La Tengo. This, along with the misconception that Lou Reed had something to do with this movie (due to the cover), were the reasons I plunked down a dollar for this. Additionally, you get the Pixies song everyone put on a tape for me in the 90s, a Lemonheads track from their contemporary release, and a Miracle Legion cover of Mission Of Burma that only appeared on the Japanese release of their debut LP. There's a token hip hop track from Schooly-D, and even the great Alex Chilton shows up with "Rock Hard" from his classic 1979 record "Like Flies On Sherbert". Shout out to Jim Dunbar, who was music supervisor on the movie, did A&R for Columbia in the 90s, and also played in Wylde Ratttz for "Velvet Goldmine".

All of this is to say that I'm not going to chase down a copy of "A Matter Of Degrees", but I would probably throw it on one Sunday morning when my wife is still asleep and I'm doing laundry.

Discogs

Click here to download.

various artists - Tony Hawk's American Wasteland

It feels weird to realize it's been 20 years since I last bought a Tony Hawk video game. But that fact dawned on me as I started writing up this soundtrack, which is the only thing I remember immediately about playing THAW on my 360. The soundtrack was released by Vagrant Records, and contains fourteen bands you'd associate with that era of mainstream punk rock, playing 14 classic punk and hardcore tracks. It's all very America-focused; the players drawn the the U.S., and the Buzzcocks the only band that didn't originate in the U.S.A.

So, is it any good, twenty years on? Well, there's a bunch of SoCal punk/HC represented: Suicidal Tendencies, Descendents, the Adolescents, Fear, T.S.O.L., and Black Flag all have classic songs from their catalogs appear. And the bands performing those tracks sync up pretty well, with Alkaline Trio playing "Wash Away" and Senses Fail playing "Institutionalized". No surprises here...unless you're surprised that everyone acquits themselves pretty well. I mean, didn't Rise Against perform as Black Flag in a movie around this time?

It's on the less expected cuts that this becomes more than the sort of thing you'd get as a freebie at Warped Tour or a cheap-o sampler at Hot Topic. My Chemical Romance cover the Misfits' "Astro Zombies", which is very on the nose and yet still pretty great. Ditto to Fall Out Boy playing "Start Today" by Gorilla Biscuits, the only post-1986 song on the comp, and very well suited to a group of hardcore lifers who somehow put out #1 records in the aughts. Thrice squeeze two Minor Threat songs into their single track, the Bled (who I barely remember) play a deep cut Bad Trains track from "I Against I", and Thursday contribute the aforementioned Buzzcocks song, a very energetic "Ever Fallen In Love". My favorite remains Hot Snakes' cover of "Time To Escape", a Government Issue track originally released on "Joy Ride". It feels a bit incongruous for Mssrs. Froberg, Reis, Wood, and Rubalcaba to pop up here, just as it's an equally odd contribution catalog-wise, but, for me, it's a highlight. Not to mention it's the last song released by Hot Snakes for nearly 13 years.

To answer my earlier question: yeah, both in the rearview AND today, this is pretty decent. There are a couple of duds here (which I won't call out by name), but swap out the 2005 covers with the originals and it's not too far off from the mixtapes I skated to in 1993. Which seems to be the point of this soundtrack in the first place...to recall those pre-X Games years where you'd tear ass around town to build half pipes and ramps that might only last for a few days before getting torn down, soundtracked by tunes made by kids just like you. 

Discogs

Click here to download.

various artists - Tromeo & Juliet (Original Motion Picture Soundtrack)

When I saw the other day that James Gunn had yet another movie open #1 at the box office, I was reminded, yet again, that he made his bones writing "Tromeo & Juliet", Troma's beloved take on Shakespeare. So it led me to bust out this shiny slab of aluminum. I bought it b/c Troma and Unsane, I kept it b/c Motörhead and Superchunk and Meatmen and Wesley Willis. Hell, they even managed to wedge a song from Gunn's band, the Icons, on here.

This is not going to show up on a listical of iconic 90s soundtracks. But I'd suggest that it should be recognized as part of the canon. While there's little here that is exclusive to the soundtrack, it does offer a wide swath of "alternative" rock from the late 90s, from a deep cut from Sublime to music from the Ass Ponys and Supernova. Plus: Brujeria!

Discogs

Click here to download.

various artists - Hairspray (Original Motion Picture Soundtrack)

It's dawned on me that I probably underrate "Hairspray" as a movie, almost certainly on account of what it became. I still can't believe that there was a successful musical adaptation of a John Waters movie, yet here we are. I think my niece auditioned for Traci Trunblad last year. It's a weird world. Thankfully.

The musical makes me mad because there isn't nearly enough Toussaint McCall or Gene Pitney or Barbara Lynn. There are a bunch of theatre kids singing about acceptance, I guess. Which is all well and good, but nothing equivalent to "The Bug".

John Waters soundtracks are the shit, is what I'm saying. I like this one so much, I own copies on vinyl, CD, and cassette. And I'd probably buy it on 8-track if it'd come out in that format.

Discogs

Click here to download.

various artists - Good Vibrations: A Record Shop, A Label, A Film Soundtrack

It's a quiet Sunday, the first weekend of April, here in the PNW, a bit rainy and grey. A wonderful day for laundry, the Criterion Channel, and a bit of light blogging. We're back in the saddle again, picking up where we left off with this, the soundtrack to a documentary about one of the all-time great shops/labels/institutions, Belfast's Good Vibrations. And while I've not seen the doc, this is one I couldn't leave behind on the Central Coast last winter when it crossed my path at $7.

Is it nitpicky to ask why Protex isn't here? Yeah, it is, but "Don't Ring Me Up" was G.V.'s sixth release. Its absence seems a bit pointed. But I can't find any fault with what was compiled here. A mix of Good Vibrations releases ("Teenage Kicks", "Big Time", "Just Another Teenage Rebel"), inspirations (Bert Jansch, Bowie, Niney The Observer, the Shangri-Las), and contemporaries (S.L.F., the Saints, Suicide) make for a really great record of what made the shop so special in its relatively short life.

Discogs

Click here to download.

various artists - Screwed (Original Motion Picture Soundtrack)

I'll never quite wrap my head around Atlantic distributing Amphetamine Reptile back in the mid-90s, and this record is evidence I'll present to support my argument. Sure, Helmet made some serious inroads with the kids of 1995, but I'm not sure who thought Hammerhead or Cows were a fit alongside Aretha Franklin, Led Zeppelin, and Foreigner. It's so perverse; I kind of love it.

And speaking of perversity: here's the soundtrack to a documentary on New York publisher and pornographer Al Goldstein entitled "Screwed". It makes sense to have a bunch of AmRep luminaries provide the score to such a downer of a movie. Halo of Kitten (a collaboration between Halo of Flies and Free Kitten) and the Melvins offer alternate views on porn: one likes it, the other hates it. There's tracks from Guv'ner and Big Chief and Boss Hog and the almighty Mudhoney, all XXX-themed and just rightly written to play behind a view of a porn king's crumbling empire.

Discogs

Click here to download.

Post #600 - A Dirty Shame (Original Motion Picture Soundtrack)

I'd had this idea once that I would gather all the soundtracks from John Waters' filmography, and post them here, along with my thoughts on the film and sounds. Clearly, I've not followed through until now, and I don't think I'm going to do it, but better to disclose, I suppose.

This is, at this late date, the final feature from the Baltimore auteur, a development that makes me sadder every single day. While a lot of folks don't think highly of "A Dirty Shame", I like it just fine. I love the ongoing images of Tracy Ullman manning the register at a High's Dairy Store, Johnny Knoxville hanging out on Harford Road, Selma Blair flouncing about northeast Baltimore. By the time this came out, I had a few friends who'd bought houses out where this was shot. I still lived downtown, so I took joy in calling them neutersm teasing them for finding housing outside the Beltway.

"He who fucks nuns/will later join the church," the saying goes. And the author types it up in a comfy suburban apartment, overlooking a pool turning green in the fall's light.

The soundtrack reflects Mssr. Waters' taste to a T; a mix of rockabilly, jump blues, rhythm & blues, novelty cuts, and early rock 'n' roll. James Intveld's score gets represented with "Let's Go Sexin'"; fine advice, if I've ever heard it. It's all enough to make a Balmer boy miss home, to lust for a RoFo 2-piece and a roll, a trip to Sherri's Showbar, some late night hangs Holiday House.

Discogs

Click here to download.

various artists - Slaves Of New York (Original Motion Picture Soundtrack)

What do you think it was that lead to pay a penny (plus $1.75 S&H!) to bring this home? I've never seen the Merchant-Ivory film to which this provides the soundtrack. The only artist here I love is Iggy, and I didn't need to snag this to have "Fall In Love With Me". I don't stan P.I.L. or Boy George, and Maxi Priest & Ziggy Marley are low on my list of reggae artists I'm interested in.

That leaves a weird mix of songs that made for a nice surprise. "Buffalo Stance" broughr back memories of my first Walkman, playing the hell out of Neneh Cherry and Public Enemy and DJ Jazzy Jeff & the Fresh Prince before I needed to use deodorant regularly. "Good Life"? Only one of the all-timer house cuts, from one of the Belleville Three. There's a pair of Arto Lindsay tracks here, both derived from the second Ambitious Lovers record. With guest spots from Vernon Reid and John Zorn, these are a duo of pretty awesome mid-80s downtown tracks, the sort of which you'd NEVER see on a major label release these days. The whole thing wraps up with a cut from French new wavers Les Rita Mitsouko, a curiousity the likes of which I found most welcome.

That Dalmatian on the cover looks like it aims to misbehave. What a naughty dog.

Discogs

Click here to download.

various artists - Amateur Soundtrack - A Film By Hal Hartley

"I am a star / A Hal Hartley movie / I read my lines / Straight faced in the mirror"

 Kind Of Like Spitting, "Your Favorite Actor"

Here's another Matador soundtrack from the mid 90s, this time from Hal Hartley''s fifth film, 1994's Amateur.

Does it feature Martin Donovan? You bet it does.

Is Parker Posey in it? She is not.

It does star Isabelle Huppert, a secret crush of mine, as an ex-nun named "Isabelle" who gets wrapped up in criminal hijinks spining out of her new career as a pornographer.

Did you get all that? I was told recently I had a way with log lines, but I dunno.

This is one of the places where Liz Phair, My Bloody Valentine, and the Jesus Lizard could comfortably rub elbows back in those days. And I find the Ned Rifle/Jeffrey Taylor score to be a pretty great appendix to what would have otherwise been a decent Lollapalooza 1995 sampler.

8/10. Now go watch the movie. You're going to have to find a physical copy, tho; it's ain't on streaming here in the States.

Discogs

Click here to download.

various artists - Kids In The Hall: Brain Candy (Original Motion Picture Soundtrack)

Matador put out more than a few soundtracks over the years, and even though I loved this movie and have made a fuckton of references to Death Lurks and "I'm Gay", I hadn't owned this one until this year. It makes sense; I'm pretty sure there are only four original songs from the film here, a few of the Kids' Canadian buds, along with a layer of contemporary Matador sounds from their Atlantic days.

I feel like this should have come out on, I dunno, Sudden Death or Arts & Crafts or Attic? Some established Canadian label, replacing Liz Phair with Sarah McLachlan and GbV with...Cub? Really lean into the Canuckness.

Discogs

Click here to download.

various artists - You've Just HEARD The Movie, Now Hear This...Hype!

This one had been sitting in a box for about 22 years before I finally whipped it out and ripped it. A promo-only sampler, timed to release in alongside the VHS of Doug Prey's "Hype!", it's five recent cuts from Sub Pop artists. I probably snagged it for the Murder City Devils track; I held onto it for the cover, the simplicity of which still really appeals to me. Not being able to say much about the other four artists on this 5" disc, I guess I should throw this onto my phone and give it a spin in the car.

The sale of this piece is prohibited.

Discogs

Click here to download.

various artists - The Sound Gallery Volume Two

Remember back when I said I was going to post all the Scamp reissues I owned? And then I did no such thing? And I became what is known affectionately the world around as "a liar"?

That was a good time.

Clearly, Rome was not built in a day, and lies cannot be rewound, only countered. Here's my piddling effort, a swing to make things right for your Monday. This is Volume Two of the two-volume Scamp series "The Sound Gallery". Why not Volume One first, you might ask? Well, Volume One lives on a hard drive that I cannot currently find. So Volume Two is what you get.

What you get here is a wealth of late 60s through mid 70s film scoring/library music/lounge music/songs for the swapping set. Were you born too young to throw your keys into a bowl at a party? Does the word "Eurosleaze" evoke clear images for you? Do you crash YouTube looking for four-episode ITV adventure series? Then this here is your soundtrack.

Discogs

Click here to download.

various artists - Ren & Stimpy: You Eediot!

I told them I would shoot, but they didn't believe me.

Why didn't they believe me?

Discogs

Click here to download.

Yusuke Homma - Fushigi Yûgi・ Original Soundtrack

Not a compilation, per se, but it's a pretty cool find, features multiple performers of Yusuke Homma's score, and this is my blog, not yours. So it's allowed.

Mrs. Ape, the Mummy Mommy, has been revisiting a lot of anime in recent months. And I manage to turn up a lot of Taiwanese grey-market soundtracks out in this part of the country. Put it all together, and she's thrilled whenever I show up with the music from one of her childhood favs. Yusuke Homma's anison for Fushigi Yugi, featuring vocals from Akemi Satou and Yukari Konno, hits that sweet spot for both of us. For her, it evokes adolescent weekdays after school in a small town on the Central Coast, slotted beside the likes of Sailor Moon. For me, it's some of that sweet, sweet J-pop, reminding me it's a-ok to still get stoked on anime, even as I'm nearer to 50 than 15.

Discogs

Click here to download.

various artists - Extraits Des Bandes Originales Des Films De Jacques Tati

The missus is now almost a year deep into daily French lessons, which means I've been watching a fair amount more French cinema than is usual. Which was already a sizable amount.

So we've been revisiting Jacques Tati's six films again. I snagged her Criterion's The Complete Jacques Tati a few years back; no need to figure out where or if they're being streamed. And I found this lil gem in a stack of cruddy easy listening and modern jazz CDs at an estate sale a few months ago. It's all music scored for Tati's first four films, from composers including Alain Romans, Francis Lemarque, and Franck Barcellini.

Slap this on, revel in the caperin' and clownin'. It is all very, how you say, French.

Discogs

Click here to download.

various artists - Blood On The Flat Track: Soundtrack From The Documentary

I was futzing about immediately following an interview (the first in-person one I've had in eight years) when two things happened. I got an e-mail from a prospective employer, telling me that I would not be hired for a gig I've interviewed for three times. It really bummed me out. I got out of the car and strolled into the chain thrift store, hoping to take my mind off the disappointment of a small rejection. And then the second thing happened.

I stumbled across a small vein of WA state indie CD and weird hip-hop on the shelf. Any time I do so is guaranteed to cheer me up immensely. The hip-hop was a bust; none of the CDs had the right discs in them, so I wouldn't be bringing home those Rhymesayers or Rawkus releases. But there was a bit of gold sitting up there, in the form of the soundtrack to "Blood on The Flat Track". I didn't even know a soundtrack had been released, but there it was, in all its physical glory. It looked to be a CD Baby pressing; a CDr with a barcode, a basic layout, some artwork...just a step up from what you could do with a home computer.

"But the sounds, man, tell me about the sounds!", I hear you hollerin'. There's five Dirtbombs tracks here, compiled from a wide range of sources. That, right there, is worth the price of admission, especially when that price is just a buck ninety-nine. The Kent 3, Bellingham garage rockers of some renown from 20+ years ago, also a quartet of tracks from their catalog. A Frames did a record from Sub Pop about 15 years ago that I remember digging; they contribute a pair of cuts. All in all, there's 18 tracks here, all of which are pretty great, standing proudly alongside any comp of PNW punk rock that Estrus, Dirtnap, Super Electro, or Empty released in the past 20 years.

Whoever put this together provided a pretty great soundtrack to an equally great documentary about roller derby. And whoever dropped this off at the Everett Value Village has my thanks, because it's what I've been listening to for the past few days.

Discogs

Click here to download.

Dan The Automator Presents 2K7

As soundtracks go, this one's fairly ridiculous. Production by Dan The Automator, rhymes from the likes of Ghostface Killah, Mos Def, A Tribe Called Quest, E-40. All in the service of the Shaquille O'Neal-fronted NBA 2K7.

Did I buy this on CD when it came out? I know I had a copy of the game that I played the ever-loving shit out of in 2006, but it seems unlikely I would have chosen a CD over the double LP, considering how much I loved Dan The Automator back then. C'mon...the man helped create the Dr. Octagon & Deltron 3030 records.

I'm far too lazy to fact check and see how many of these got issued elsewhere. Let's pretend they're all exclusive to this, shall we?

Discogs

Click here to download.

various artists - Pump Up The Volume (Complete Soundtrack & Score)

I'll own up, on this Day of our Lord, Saturday, January 16, 2021, that I wanted to grow up to be Hard Harry.

What right minded pre-teen/post-adolescent wouldn't be drawn to Christian Slater in the 1990 cult film "Pump Up The Volume"? By day, a meek, withdrawn student; by night, a foul-mouthed, truth slinging, chronically masturbating pirate radio DJ. AND he ends up getting with Samantha Mathis. Hey, when you're 14 and you've switched schools three times in as many years, there's not much about Mark Hunter's life that you can't relate to. All that pent up frustration and hormonal imbalance gets filtered into music fandom and diving into Beat poetry and maybe, just maybe, you'll meet a girl who doesn't find you repellent and will drive around town listening to They Might Be Giants and the Clash and actually be into it.

But I digress.

I haven't the faintest remembrance where I initially downloaded this version, but I've owned, in some form, the official soundtrack to "Pump Up The Volume" since I saw it on VHS sometime in early 1991. I definitely remember it being part of the first purchase I made at Record & Tape Traders in Roanoke, along with a Pink Floyd CD and Soundgarden's "Ultramega OK". I was always bummed that there was no Leonard Cohen on that tape. Nor were the Beastie Boys or Descendents present, or that "Hi, dad, I'm in jail" jam. What the shit, MCA Records? BUT it was my first exposure to the Pixies (via a superior version of "Wave of Mutilation"), Henry Rollins, Bad Brains, and the MC5 (a still fun cover of "Kick Out The Jams"). I even got to sneak some Dr. Dre beats into the house; the likes of NWA wasn't exactly allowed at home at that point.

I found this expanded version, which has never been officially released, on the internet sometime around 2009. As I stated above, I can't recall the website I initially downloaded it from, but [sgm] did their own writeup a few years back. So I'm in fine company, I suppose. This includes every song that appeared in the film and on the soundtrack, as well as the entirety of Cliff Martinez's excellent score, which never got a release of its own. This, along with his score to "Sex, Lies, And Videotape", are an amazing first and second recordings for the former Weirdo/Dickie turned film composer.

It's worth downloading because you get "Everybody Knows", "Love Comes In Spurts", and "The Scenario" all in one place. Respect to Kathy Nelson, who served as music supervisor here, and whose credits include "Repo Man", "Pulp Fiction", "Grosse Point Blank", and approximately 200 more movies whose soundtracks you bought at the mall in the 90s and 00s.

Click here to download.