1) Shasta; 2) [Can] Vitamin C; 3) Meeting Crocker Fenway; 4) [The Marketts] Here Comes The Ho-Dads; 5) Spooks; 6) Shasta Fay; 7) [Minnie Riperton] Les Fleur; 8) The Chryskylodon Institute; 9) [Kyu Sakamoto] Sukiyaki; 10) Adrian Prussia; 11) [Neil Young] Journey Through The Past; 12) [Les Baxter] Simba; 13) Under The Paving-Stones, The Beach!; 14) The Golden Fang; 15) Amethyst; 16) Shasta Fay Hepworth; 17) [Chuck Jackson] Any Day Now.
General verdict: Too much soundtrack, not enough Jonny - then again, maybe it's not a bad thing...
Since we are already neck-deep in Jonny
Greenwood soundtracks to P. Th. Anderson's movies, I suppose there is no reason
not to mention yet another one: this time, to 2014's Inherent Vice, another one I have not seen, nor have I read Thomas
Pynchon's novel upon which the movie was based (sorry, too much culture in this
world for poor little me!). However, «mention» is the key word here, because
this time around, the whole thing does really look like a genuine soundtrack,
rather than an instrumental thematic suite that may be enjoyed on its own,
independently of the adjacent material — thus precluding the option of a
serious review.
Approximately one-third of the album consists
of non-Greenwood music used in the movie — a decent and expectedly diverse
selection of tracks, for that matter, ranging from Can's ʽVitamin Cʼ to Minnie
Riperton's ʽLes Fleurʼ to some long-forgotten (Tarantino-approved) pop nuggets
from the early Sixties (I have never heard the Marketts' ʽHere Comes The
Ho-Dadsʼ before, for instance — that's some nifty fine and inventive use of
the sax out there!). These at least serve an educational purpose, though,
clearly, the album cannot be rated based on them, and their effect can be
fairly disruptive if you want to concentrate on Greenwood's compositional
genius.
Worse, much of the rest is really and truly incidental
music: small minimalistic pieces of ambience that are not worth much outside
of the movie. ʽSpooksʼ is just two and a half minutes of lazy mid-Sixties style
psychedelic jamming, atmospherically close to the first minute of The Doors'
ʽThe Endʼ or a fairly slack Velvet Underground improv on a mediocre evening —
with Joanna Newsom, who has a part in the movie, putting a narrative on top
(meaning that fans of her voice are obliged to add the album to their
collection); ʽUnder The Paving-Stonesʼ later returns to the exact same
atmosphere. And ʽAmethystʼ is a fairly typical acoustic folk instrumental with
a very Dylanesque harmonica part — you don't really have to be Jonny Greenwood
to be able to come up with something like that in 2014.
Basically, this leaves us with three
instrumental pieces revolving around the movie's protagonist — ʽShastaʼ, ʽShasta
Fayʼ, ʽShasta Fay Hepworthʼ, about 15 minutes worth of pleasant neoclassical chamber
music in Jonny's usual neoclassical style; and exactly one track that perks up my interest — ʽAdrian Prussiaʼ, a very
interesting mold of classical and electronic music of which I wish there'd be so
much more in Jonny's solo catalog. Starting out as a suspenseful,
bass-and-cello-based mid-tempo «classical rocker», the track soon gets a fairly
harsh, half-psychedelic, half-industrial digital pattern sewn in, with the
classical and electronic voices seamlessly merging as a single whole and
building up to a small, but elegant crescendo. Hopelessly lost in the
befuddling confines of the soundtrack, it's a really auspicious little piece of
music that deserves to be extracted, dusted off, and extolled as a good example
of genre synthesis.
Other than that, I do believe that this is one
of the least essential of Jonny's soundtracks — but, ironically, perhaps one of
the most easily accessible, what with all those extra good tracks, many of
which many of us have never heard before, showcasing a good knowledge of and
taste for old forgotten beauties. (The Minnie Riperton piece is ace, too, and
Kyu Sakamoto's ʽSukiyakiʼ is supposed to be one of the most famous Japanese pop
pieces of the Sixties, though my personal interest in suave Japanese tenor
crooners is fairly small).
Regarding the movie; I don't know how anyone is supposed follow what's going on without having read the book first. As a Pynchon fan I had read the book a number of times before I saw the film and even I thought it flew along way too fast to make any kind of sense. At the time of this film's release I read that Anderson also wanted to tackle Gravity's Rainbow. I haven't heard anything about this since so hopefully it's fallen by the wayside. Pynchon's work is pretty much unfilmable.
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