If there's any UK drama that lends itself really well to an ethic of musicality - it's Skins. Over the show's previous five seasons it's carved out a deep vein in the British consciousness - and while it might not always be an entirely accurate representation of wild British teens - it makes a very considered stab at it, and on the whole, it comes off well.
And the music that soundtracks it comes as a big part of that, it's there in the show's make-up, it's DNA; and songs like Kankouran's Rivers feel like the perfect fit to all kinds of assorted scenes of drunken, angsty mayhem.
For the foursome, things must be looking rather rosy right now as Rivers soundtracks the trailer for the sixth series of Skins (due to start in January), and while that probably lends your band a certain kind of image in line with the show's 'Young people, yeah!' quasi-indie feel, the exposure must be quite nice.
It's when the chorus kicks off that the song really gets going - all scratchy and low-fi, the motorik kick of the synths twirling away under the guitar give the song a poignant feeling of motion. It's a bit like MGMT colliding with Arcade Fire in a hectic cocktail of drug-laced dreams. This is the band's road movie track, the ode to breaking out from narrow home-town confinement. Hopes, ambitions, dreams - all are swept up in these four short minutes.
When you're soundtracking a dark gothy movie like Underworld (the forth instalment of which - Awakening - is out in cinemas in January), the likes of Linkin Park, The Cure and Evanescence seem like obvious shoe-ins. They certainly play to the tastes of what you might imagine the target audience to be.
Of particular interest is the Renholder Remix of Linkin Park's Blackout - easily one of the standout tracks from their A Thousand Suns album. As the band work on its follow-up, this remix serves as a tantalising offering to tide us fans over until new material proper arrives.
The original version of Blackout was Linkin Park at both their most epic and sonically adventurous - while all the time still maintaining their vital commercial sensibilities, those hooks that have kept fans coming back for more again and again.
Renholder himself (AKA Danny Lohner) has worked with rock royalty himself in the form of Trent Reznor, so we can hopefully expect something suitably industrial and amazing. His previous work with the Underworld franchise encompassed pulsing, low-slung basslines throbbing with darkly sexual rhythms and synthetic power.
With Linkin Park previously covering NIN classic Wish, this new remix of Blackout represents another coming together (of sorts) of the bands' collective legacies and one we're definitely down for.
The full Underworld: Awakening soundtrack is as follows:
Evanescence - 'Made of Stone' (Renholder Remix)
Lacey Sturm - 'Heavy Prey'
Linkin Park - 'Blackout' (Renholder Remix)
The Cure - 'Apart' (Renholder Remix)
Stella Katsoudas - 'Killer & a Queen'
Ministry - 'Watch Yourself' (Renholder Remix)
Lacuna Coil - 'Trip The Darkness' (Ben Weinman Remix)
The Naked and Famous - 'Young Blood' (Renholder Remix)
Black Light Burns - 'It Rapes All In Its Path'
William Control - 'The Posthumous Letter'
Civil Twilights - 'How I'm I Supposed To Die'
& Sons - 'Consolation Prize'
8MM - 'Liar'
Ryan T. Hope - 'You Won't See the Light'
Combichrist - 'Bottle of Pain'
Collide - 'Intruder'
Justin Lassen feat. Silent Fury - 'Exit Wounds' (Justin Lassen Remix)
I've been indulging my geek side a lot recently, and that's included revisiting the soundtracks to some of the favourite videogames from my past. And when it comes to videogame music, you don't get any better than Final Fantasy. The Fight With Seymour theme from FF 10 is one of the absolute best - a dizzying medley of bonkers keyboard riffs and faux-hard rock percussion. Just sublime.
I’ve long had dreams of a film in the vein of the Final Fantasy video-games, or a movie where a plucky girl-band-esque group kick serious butt. I never thought such dreams would ever feed through into reality. But then along came Sucker Punch, the film that sees the true wonders of the imagination painted out in the most vivid way possible. Sitting down to watch a special press-screening of the film at the BFI IMAX - accompanied by a brilliant and highly informative Q&A session with the movie’s director Zack Snyder – I really wasn’t sure what to expect. I’d seen the trailers and thought the film looked cool. I was about to find out just how cool.
The story is that of 20 year old ‘Baby Doll’ who is shipped off to a mental asylum by her cruel step-father. To escape the impossible horror of the situation, Baby Doll immerses herself in the fantasy world of her own mind, striking up a friendship with four fellow girl-inmates. And it is the adventures of this feisty fivesome that become the foundations of the jaw-dropping spectacular that is Sucker Punch.
The film is a pure visual treat, a piece of the sweetest eye-candy you’ll ever taste. The pace never slackens; this is the action film genre at its most relentless. It really is Kill Bill on steroids. Never before have I felt myself going ‘Oh My God, that was so cool!’ so many times in a film. I was actually grinning ear to ear at times simply from the pure sense of awesome-ness on offer – this film sure as hell knows its audience and plays to it at every moment. The result: a fine-tuned end-product that hits all the right buttons. Let’s just have a run-down of some of some of the stuff on offer:
Lots and lots of fight-sequences.
A mind-boggling amount of slow motion.
Girls in skimpy outfits firing lots of guns.
Giant samurai with glowing red eyes.
Steampunk clockwork Nazi’s.
A massive siege on a castle, complete with giant fire-breathing dragon.
A bomb-laden train hurtling across a backdrop dominated by a Saturn-like planet hanging in the sky.
I Robot-style ‘mechanised soldiers’.
And then there’s the grim, oppression of the prison setting and period set-dressing – bringing with it parallels to The Shawshank Redemption and The Green Mile. At a push you could even say it was the ‘girl version’ of said films – at any rate, there’s those same themes of finding hope in the darkest of places. A singular driving focus, a yearning for escape, keeping you strong through everything the world chucks at you.
Sucker Punch also plays around a lot with the whole dream-within-a-dream concept; and in a post-Inception world, it more than holds its own. There’s definitely something of the energy, creative visual power and feminine force of stuff like Run Lola Run. The styling is inspired too; that whole 50s with a few modern twists vibe that the Fallout videogames and Lemony Snicket’s A Series Of Unfortunate Events have done so well.
In terms of the CGI visuals and sense of immersive-ness in the film, it’s easily on a par with, if not better than, the likes of Avatar and Tron Legacy. Sucker Punch was made for venues like the IMAX where you can be truly tipped into the action headfirst; swooping, falling, diving endlessly through a rollercoaster of energy, tension and pure no-holds-barred action. It’s Indiana Jones on over-drive, The Matrix running on atomic power. There really is a little bit of so many films here; their essences distilled down and combined into one. Add in the fantastic soundtrack, which forms a key part of the film, and you have something really special.
For many films, the soundtrack seems almost an afterthought, something pretty to round everything off – but with Sucker Punch, it becomes integral; the life-blood running through the very heart of the movie. All the tracks fit perfectly, from Emily Browning’s atmospheric, gothic cover of the Eurythmics Sweet Dreams (Are Made of This) to Emiliana Torrini’s White Rabbit. For me though, the true highlight has to be the version of The Beatles’ Tomorrow Never Knows re-envisioned by Alison Mosshart and Carla Azar. They transform the 60s classic into an epic seven minute long masterpiece, all the psychedelic magic of the original turned up a notch and married with riotous guitar solos and immense beats - Imagine The Chemical Brothers meets Electronic. This track accompanies the afore-mentioned bomb-on-a-train scenes and it really does help transform an already highly impressive action sequence into true audio-visual poetry. It quite literally blew my mind.
Sucker Punch really is a cinematic experience like no other. It’s almost as if by drawing from so many different sources and elements from pop culture, Sucker Punch transcends to another level of film-making. I remain to this day a massive fan of science-fiction and fantasy, and back when I was at school, dreams and fantasies on the scale of Sucker Punch were my escape from the hum-drum tedium of classes. In my mind, I had it all there, all these fantastical ideas circulating around – as well as all the enchanting books, films and video-games that had helped inspire these ideas. Because that’s what science-fiction and fantasy are – a melting pot of ideas constantly feeding into each-other. And just as these ideas were my escape from reality, so to are they Baby Doll’s ideas; her dreams, her visions... her escape from reality.
A lot of people simply won’t ‘get’ Sucker Punch. And it’s a film that needs to be truly understood. Fair enough, it’s not for everyone; and no amount of persuading and convincing will change their minds (something I know only too well, trying to convey the wonders of pop music to indie-lovers). But for me, Sucker Punch is the perfect realisation of everything that is wonderful about the imagination. It's a movie that feels like it could just as easily be a video game or a two hour long music video. It’s the perfect fantasy, the perfect escape. And in a way, isn’t that what cinema is meant to provide?
Oh, and did I mention that the girls are absolutely, breathtakingly gorgeous?
Sucker Punch is out in cinemas on April 1st and the soundtrack is available to download from iTunes here.
The Pet Shop Boys doing a ballet soundtrack? For any other pop act, this might appear an incredibly daunting task; but for the duo who against all odds have remained relevant across 25 years of history, this represents a fascinating exercise in song-writing brilliance. Of course the most obvious comparisons will be to the Pet Shop Boys previous soundtrack which they produced for the film Battleship Potemkin. While The Most Incredible Thing might not be as powerful and forceful as that work, it revels in its far more pretty subtleties. And while slightly more outré moments like some of The Clock segments can throw the listener off a little, on the whole I reckon this is a far stronger and more consistent work. The real magic here is that the music really does tell the story. There’s a wonderful little storybook that comes with the CD that tells the narrative of the ballet, and tying that narrative to the music, it all fits so well. And as with all great soundtracks, there’s marvellous little motifs that re-occur throughout the duration, little hooks that snag your mind and draw you in to the whole bewitching magic of it all. For the hour or so of its duration, you belong to this album and its music – completely and utterly.
Tracks like The Challenge have a dramatic, epic beauty to them and the synth/orchestra blend that falls across the whole album is simply breathtaking. Moments remind me of the brilliant soundtracks to the Final Fantasy video-game series and that same sweeping grandeur and sense of wonder. Meanwhile, the guitar-edged Risk has moment of the Chung King Express soundtrack to it. The Competition will please PSB traditionalists, it’s all acid house bleepy synths and crowd noise – in an instant we’re taken back to the early 90s – I’m pretty sure it samples the Perfect Immaculate Mix of Integral too. As the track develops and the orchestral elements come to fore there’s strong vibes of the DJ Culture b-side Overture to Performance. And it’s here that you see the sheer wonder of this album emerge, this is the album the PSB’s have had in them their entire career long – we’ve seen glimpses of it peeping out in every album of theirs, but now, we have the complete end-product in marvellous soundtrack form.
Oh, and one last thing, I really, really want a full version of ‘What Do You Want From Me Baby’ that crops up halfway through The Grind.
