album review: scott pilgrim vs the world ost. various artists. 10 aug 2010. abkco music & records

first off, full disclosure. i love broken social scene. i love beck. i really want to see scott pilgrim vs the world. this was never going to get a negative review from me. add to the fact that i also love blood red shoes, the rolling stones and metric, all of whom also appear on the soundtrack and you have made a soundtrack you’re going to have to work hard for me not to love.

having said that, this isn’t as perfect for me as the contributors involved would suggest. the reason is broken social scene’s appearance. i first fell for the collective a few years back and, as i may have mentioned before, ‘you forgot it in people’ is one of my top five albums of all time. what’s gone wrong with their contribution here then? three tracks. one re-release (albeit the fantastic ‘anthems for a seventeen-year-old girl’) and two under the guise of crash & the boys that come in at less than a minute each. they are deliberately playing an arty-farty rival band, and i am sure this is relevant to the film, but it still left me a little disappointed.

beck ups the ante with some superb work as both himself and scott’s own band, sex bob-omb, and all other tracks fit the soundtrack nicely – especially metric. i think this may well get to the route of the problem. the soundtrack sounds very much like a soundtrack, not an album. does that make sense? i probably need to see the film to appreciate it properly, and i am fairly confident that i will listen to it many times once i have. that’s the beauty of proper soundtracks though. they don’t just act as music, they also send you back into the cinema.

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i’m really sorry about the amazingly unoriginal post title by the way. it’s been a long day.