Soundtracks that were better than the film - Judgement Night 1993 (Epic Records)

Do you remember this Emilio Estevez/Dennis Leary star vehicle? No? You aren't missing anything. It's a completely forgettable movie where some friends take a wrong turn and then face bad guys until the final confrontation where the good guys win. Cuba Gooding Jr co-stars and there's a guy on the poster who isn't billed with the others (it's Stephen Dorff). You can watch this entire movie on youtube if you are so inclined.

The soundtrack has a great marketing gimmick, take a bunch of metal and rock acts then pair them up with rappers. Run D.M.C. had a big hit with Aerosmith in 'Walk this Way' in 1986 so it was proven to work. Somehow the marketers found some game artists to sell their wares and most of the big acts of the early nineties came along.This album hasn't got very distinctive lyrics or anything, it is all style.

Playlist :
01. Just Another Victim - Helmet & House Of Pain
02. Fallin - Teenage Fanclub & De La Soul
03. Me, Myself & My Microphone - Living Colour & Run D.M.C.
04. Judgment Night - Biohazard & Onyx
05. Disorder - Slayer & Ice-T
06. Another Body Murdered - Faith No More & Boo-Yaa T.R.I.B.E.
07. I Love You Mary Jane - Sonic Youth & Cypress Hill
08. Freak Momma - Mudhoney & Sir Mix-A-Lot
09. Missing Link - Dinosaur Jr & Del The Funky Homosapien
10. Come And Die - Therapy? & Fatal
11. Real Thing - Pearl Jam & Cypress Hill

Marketing is one thing but having a good product is another. This is a good product and showed that the mix of these two musics was not only workable but in some cases...logical. The fusion of rap and rock was a long way from being popular when this music was made and wasn't yet associated with privileged suburban white youth and the huge amount of disposable rap-metal acts that came along in the late 1990's. Angry subject matter for no reason can sell and that is what this album is about. This soundtrack is about a sound and a mood. A mood where you grimace and swear a lot.

Most of this album takes rap acts and makes the music behind much more aggressive and for what it's worth, it works. 'Me, Myself and My Microphone' has Run D.M.C. working with a good guitarist instead of a sampled one and it works well. Biohazard and Onyx have similar shout-along styles in their main careers so their effort has a mean groove. Ice-T had worked with a metal band called Bodycount before who weren't very technically gifted and lacked punch but here he works with the kicking Slayer for a very direct angry and topical workout. Faith No More added their weirdness to a simple hardcore track and what comes out is the most distinctive song on the record. Sir-Mix-a-Lot has a charming sex-rap-rock with Mudhoney. Del tha Funky Homosapien twists his tongue around a riff from Dinosaur Jr.  The song 'Fallin' has a complete 180 degree turn from the first song on the album but is a toe tapper that gives a little self-reflection from De La Soul.

Some of these songs have problems with their style, the opener 'Just Another Victim' is two songs that try to pretend they are one but each side is not bad, the whole is just a bit awkward. 'I Love you Mary Jane' is really just a Cypress Hill song with one of the Sonic Youth sampled saying 'She come bye to get me high' over and over...but that is what most people would listen to Cypress Hill for so this isn't such a bad thing. 'Come and Die' is more forgettable than the film and 'Real Thing' is merely okay but arrives too late for the party.

This soundtrack does trump the film and showed how marketable rap metal was. Check it out below. 

Ben Harper with Charlie Musselwhite - Get Up! - released Jan 29th 2013 (Stax)

Genres: Blues, Electric Blues

This album needs time to grow on you but it's worth it. Ben Harper teams up with a mouth organ man named Charlie Musselwhite to tear through some blues and the results are evocative and catchy.

Ben Harper is a roots musician who has dabbled in a huge amount of different styles in his career and has been quite successful at doing it. Here is sticks to one type of music and it sounds much like a jam session in a swampy locale in one of the southern states of the USA. The sound is very clear but it retains the grit of using the mouth organ, Musselwhite's playing  really does add a dimension that isn't heard in popular music very often.Harper's singing is tuneful and soulful. The tracks a toe-tapping barn burners.

Some of the songs simmer and some boil. The opener 'Don't Look Twice' halts and aches. 'We Can't End This Way' is a gospel sing-a-long. The songs 'I Don't Believe a Word you Say' and 'Blood Side Out' are  much more propulsive and raging. The title track starts off with a funky bassline but is firmly in blues territory by the tag line "don't tell me I can't break the law cause the law has broken me". The song 'She Got Kick' pops along with happiness accepting a girl who is raunchy and tempestuous. The final song 'All that Matters Now' ends with a bit of slow grace. Everything fits together to make the whole thing satisfying.

RATING 4/5

Here is the first song off the album called 'Don't Look Twice'. Check it out.

Iggy and the Stooges - Ready to Die - released April 29th 2013 (Fat Possum)

Genres: Punk Rock, Hard-Rock, Alternative-Rock

Iggy Pop is older than your dad and rocks harder than most people half his age. Re-uniting with the remaining members of the Stooges after the death of guitarist Ron Asheton, which leaves Scott Asheton and James Williamson (he was the guitarist on the Raw Power album in 1973) along with non-Stooge alternative super-star Mike Watt (The Minutemen, fIREHOSE, Il Sogno Del Marinaio). Iggy Pop puts the older more nhilistic Stooges behind and has the time of his life! Iggy is a much better artist these days as his career has run the full cycle of explosive punk, art-rock, singer-songwriter, new wave, sell-out pop albums and back again. Leaving him with the ability to make interesting sober insights, raging hedonism and comical goofs come off as natural. When the music rages behind Iggy it never seems angry, it actually seems refined compared to the landmark punk prototype music that was the Stooges first three albums The Stooges in 1969, Funhouse in 1970 and Raw Power in 1973. Iggy sings a few ballads ('Unfriendly World' 'Beat that Guy' 'The Departed') and rages hard on most of the rest. Iggy is still one of the best front-men to grace the stage and when he gets it right, as he does here, it is a joy to hear. 

These guys are senior citizens and they make righteous racket. Iggy is 66 years old and he still seems like a tireless youth when he rocks and I'm glad they put the effort into making this.

RATING: 4/5 stars

Here's the lead off track 'Burn' which starts everything on the right foot. 

Skrillex - Bangarang EP - released 24th Jan 2012 (Atlantic/Big Beat/OWSLA/WEA)

Genres: Electronic, Dub-step

I had heard some Skrillex before and his massive bass drops and wobbles are great on a huge sound system while half-cut and dancing... but for the headphones it doesn't quite fit. Skrillex became incredibly popular in certain circles around 2010 and this is one of his more recent releases. 

I picked this out of the bargin-bin at JB HI-FI and saw it was released recently but didn't check that it was released in early 2012 which precludes it from being true 'new' music. This a bit of a dud choice. 

Skrillex has a very huge sounding style that is extroverted and incredibly simple. He employs gigantic bass and constant cuts of sound, pitch shifted vocals and effects, ring-the-alarm sounds and a very strict tempo that rarely deviates. The music wants to seem like there is more going-on than there is. His style can really grate and annoy but when it clicks it is high-energy dance music. It's best to take Skrillex in small doses.

There are only 2 tracks on this 7 track EP that barely warrant a second listen. The title song 'Bangarang' (featuring Sirah) sums up all the other tracks which makes them erroneous and the finishing track 'Summit'(featuring Ellie Goulding) that is more of a straight-ahead but ultimately boring house track that shouldn't last its six-minute length.

Bottom-line, this EP sucks. It is just a single for 'Bangarang' with a few other wastes of time. Bangarang is an okay single but it is style over substance. 

RATING: 1.5/5 STARS

Here is the video for 'Bangarang' which is okay. It doesn't have much to it. 

Bombino - Nomad - released April 1st 2013 (Nonesuch Records)

Genres: Blues, African folk, Psychedelic blues

This album is really cool. It's by an African band from around the Sahara desert and produced by Dan Auerbach from the highly successful garage-blues band the Black Keys. Auerbach gives this record a cohesive and propulsive pace, the album has 11 tracks in just under 40 minutes, and a very clean atmospheric sound. The photo on the cover of a motorcyclist with a cape and guitar riding in the desert is perfect for this music.  The lyrics, sung in language, are simple and poetic. What really stands out is the guitar work that is exceptional. The guitar reminds me of the blues influenced psychedelic work of Jimi Hendrix and the late great Malian blues-man Boubacar Traore. This means this has exceptional blues pedigree.  The guitar is very fluid and melodic, it is the real focus of the tracks but this is mostly because I don't understand the lyrics without the helpful translation in the booklet. The tone of the album is rich, spacious and funky, which everybody can enjoy. Western music needs more exposure to this guy. 

If you can listen to foreign language rock'n'roll then this is highly recommended. 

RATING: 4.5/5

This is the song  'Azamane Tiliade' of the new album Nomad and it is really bloody good. 

James Blake - Overgrown - released 5th April 2013 (Polydor)

 Genres: Electronic, Singer/songwriter, Dubstep

The cover photo doesn't really suit this electronic album but it comes close as the music is desolate and wintery. What James Blake does is take the dense ambient sound much like that of British dubstep artist Burial with less emphasis on two-step beats and more on ghostly processed vocals. He finds a decent range of intensities for this set-up and some pieces really click. The RZA shows up for the track 'Take a Fall for Me' and the punch with having a rapper as counter-point to Blake's vocals makes this a stand-out. This album is one that takes a few listens to really enjoy. The lyrics are very sparse as is the overall sound. Overall this is a good listen that builds on the work of others in a logical way. You can here influences from Tricky and Massive Attack scattered all over this album but Blake isn't showy or eclectic, he's very focused on a single mood. This constant desolate and pensive mood grated on me for the first listen but after the second go round I was much more at ease with it.Overall this was an interesting listen that didn't have any real missteps.

RATING: 3.5/5

Here is the video for James Blake's song 'Retrograde' from the album Overgrown

Phoenix - Bankrupt! - released 22nd April 2013 (Glass Note/Loyaute)

Genres: Pop, Alternative Dance, Indie-Rock, 

I have never heard of this band before this album and I was pleasantly surprised that this is actually a really fun record that sounds like all of the pop music from the 1980's condensed into forty-minutes. My partner picked this off the shelves at a music store because it looked pretty and I went along with it, I was pleasantly surprised. What I didn't know is this band has been making music that sounds like the 1980's since the year 2000 and have been very successful in doing so. This band has a big shiny sound, much like all the reviled pop bands from the eighties, but they are sneaky in expanding those sounds into indie-rock and dance that should prevent even the most cynical from heaping Phoenix in with that dated sound.

This band is French and I think they have interpreted the American pop music of the eighties as outsiders and then reinvented it into a familiar but wholly different thing. Pop and rock music do this all the time and it is great to see creativity added to a type of music that a lot of people can only enjoy ironically (such as Eric Carman's song 'Hungry Eyes').

The first four tracks on this record are all winners. They had me humming their tunes all week even though the cheesiness of the sound can make one weary. The energy and the mood are everything, these tracks kick off a gleeful quick run of shiny sounds and big choruses. The lyrics and the vocals lend more to the music than the other way around.  The title track, placed at number five on the track list is a good departure, having a slow build with a keyboard and stretching out over seven minutes. Then it is straight back into whizzing verse-chorus-verse giddiness.

This is pop music that people can dance to as well as pump on earphones by themselves to decipher the quirky lyrics. I had a lot of fun with this.

RATING: 4/5 stars

Lead single 'Entertainment' below - very good!