This week: Soundtracks and Jesus. First soundtracks, and a question: Will digital music kill off the promotional-tool soundtrack album? If 1995 listeners could have cherry-picked the U2, Sunny Day Real Estate, Flaming Lips, and PJ Harvey songs off the Batman Forever soundtrack, would spare copies now be choking the $3.99 bins at used-CD stores? Maybe that's why the new Flaming Lips track from the Wedding Crashers (New Line) soundtrack can only be downloaded from iTunes with the purchase of the entire album. That's not necessarily a bad thing, however, since the soundtrack features a sampling of terrific bands like Death Cab For Cutie and Rilo Kiley, next to Mungo Jerry's unavoidable "In The Summertime" and an Owen Wilson/Vince Vaughn/Klezmer Juice Band take on "Hava Nagilah"…
Death Cab also pops up on Six Feet Under: Everything Ends (EMI), the HBO series' second soundtrack, which mixes new tracks—including a fine new Arcade Fire song and an oddly reverent (and cowbell-free) Caesars cover of "(Don't Fear) The Reaper"—with dusted-off gems from Nina Simone and Irma Thomas, who delivers a scorched reading of "Time Is On My Side"…
Even dustier: The material on Wendy Carlos' two-volume Rediscovering Lost Scores (East Side Digital) series, which collects leftover material she composed for Tron and Stanley Kubrick's The Shining and A Clockwork Orange. The Shining material prominently features the Circon, a homemade instrument Carlos describes as a "sort of a precise Theremin." She fails to mention that it's also sort of terrifying…
Picking up on the concept of the film, the Mr. & Mrs. Smith soundtrack sports 17 love songs, some ambiguous and many hostile. Most of it's pretty familiar stuff, but as a pre-built playlist, it works pretty well…
On to Jesus: Fern Jones is best known, where she's known at all, for the gospel song "I Was There When It Happened," but in 1959, she threatened to carve out her own genre when she recruited some Nashville studio aces to cut her Christian rockabilly album Singing A Happy Song. If that sounds like an unlikely combination, consider the Pentecostal undercurrents of Jerry Lee Lewis. Or better yet, listen to The Glory Road (Numero Group), which collects Happy Song and a few miscellaneous sides from Jones' fervent, rocking, too-short career…
Of course, Jones was hardly the first to tie secular styles to spiritual themes. Neither were Lester Flatt and Earl Scruggs, but they found that bluegrass could accommodate plenty of Christian themes over the course of their 21-year career. The double-disc Foggy Mountain Gospel (Columbia/Legacy) collects 52 of Flatt And Scruggs' gospel recordings, some sweet ("Reunion In Heaven") and some cautionary ("No Hiding Place Down Here"), but all performed with the duo's trademark verve and charisma. It joins two other new reissues, Flatt And Scruggs' '50s landmark Foggy Mountain Jamboree and Scruggs' 1972 album I Saw The Light With Some Help From My Friends. Leading The Earl Scruggs Revue (with sons Gary, Randy, and Steve), Scruggs opens the door to young guest vocalists Arlo Guthrie, Linda Ronstadt, and Tracy Nelson. It's a fine product of the same late-'60s/early-'70s musical spirit that produced such folk/country/rock crossovers as The Band and The Nitty Gritty Dirt Band's Will The Circle Be Unbroken. As with the other Flatt And Scruggs releases, there's no need to cherry-pick here.