The Goods
Books
106 Irvine Welsh, Muriel Gray
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1 1 0 Eightball, Jinx
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1 1O Depeche Mode, Elbow
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BUY lHI;M THIS FORTNIGHT FILM SOUNDTRACKS
aving beaten dull rockers Oasis to a pulp H with Blur’s ongoing raging creativity,
Damon Albarn is currently pushing the envelope with Gorillaz, the extremely good manufactured band he dreamed up with comic artist Jamie Hewlett. In between Blur and Gorillaz, Albarn scored the soundtrack for 101 Rekyavik (EMI O... ), the Icelandic slacker black comedy you might remember him promoting at the Edinburgh International Film Festival a couple of years back with best pal and the film’s director Baltasar Kormakur. Listening to 101 Rekyavik you can hear where Gorillaz came from. Hip hop, techno, dub and some indie frills, plus a lovely recurring refrain sampling The Kinks’ ‘Lola’, all go into this fresh, pared-down arctic brew. Alternater luminous, pulsating and grinding, Albarn's score - produced with Einar Orn Benediktsson of Icelandic all-stars GusGus - is the perfect audio reflection of Kormakur’s sweet-melancholy film. It also makes you want to quaff a pint in Damon’s pub in Rekyavik.
Clint Mansell used to shout through a bull
horn on stage about how Pop Will Eat Itself, and he was right wasn’t he? Good job, then, he got
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1 13 Sky Odyssey, Time Crisis
Video/ DVD
1 14 Charlie’s Angels
1 15 Perfect Strangers, Davina McCall
Reykjavi
Listening to Damon Albarn’s 101 Rekyavik you can hear where Gorillaz came from.
out of the pop game and started scoring soundtracks for offbeat films. Mansell did a stunning job for Darren Aronofsky on Requiem ForA Dream, where he sampled Bruce Lee’s karate chops as a basis for the soundtrack’s overture. His score for The Hole (Universal 0.. ) takes a leaf out of John Carpenter’s book and adds a few of his own chilling string arrangements. Unfortunately, this release doesn’t feature very much of Mansell's compositions. Instead it compiles a bunch of far less inspiring rock, pop and beats tracks, among them Grand Theft Auto, Rae And Christian, Tricky and Dusted. On a film soundtrack CD cover, the legend ‘Music from and inspired by the motion picture' (as is the case here) is to be avoided at all costs.
Although the soundtrack to ‘the Mexican Pulp Fiction’, Amores Perros (Universal 000. ) compiles previously recorded material by a variety of artists, it’s generally of high quality, also includes original music and has the bonus of exotic quality, that being aggressive hip hop, riotous rock, gentle folk and R&B all straight outta
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Shopping
1 17 ECA Fashion Show
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122 Dubrovnik for starters
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Mexico. And the double CD set provides the appropriate musical breadth and depth to former pop promo director Alejandro Gonzalez Inarritu's superb, lengthy crime drama.
It’s a goddam surprise ’ole Billy Bob Thornton didn’t contribute to the soundtrack for his adaptation of Cormac McCarthy‘s modern-day Western, All The Pretty Horses (Sony .000 ) — he is, after all, releasing his own country album this year. Maybe it’s a good job he didn't ’cause it gives the featured musicians - country/Tex-Mex players accompanied by an orchestra - room to make themselves heard. Hell, the title track sounds like the Tindersticks and Calexico playing together on the soundtrack of the Sam Peckinpah western that never was. I don’t knows as I can give a better recommendation than that.
(Miles Fielder)
‘ THE LIST 105
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