Kill Bill

(Maverick)

Coming from Quentin Tarantino and RZA, the geniuses behind Pulp Fiction and the Wu-Tang Clan, one would expect the Kill Bill soundtrack to be unequaled in recent history. Indeed, the album is a great companion to the film, with songs that are vivid enough to nearly recreate the script.

However, the music is clearly meant to complement the movie’s kung-fu schlock. Without the movie’s visual hi-jinks, the collection of songs comes across obscure and often bizarre: take Zamfir’s four-minute flute rendition of “The Lonely Shepard”, or “Crane / White Lightning” by RZA and Charles Berenstein, which sounds like the street fighter version of an Ennio Morricone piece.

This is often frustrating, considering that Tarantino’s previous soundtracks have been largely comprised of American popular music. But the producers still manage some ear candy—Nancy Sinatra’s rendition of “Bang Bang (My Baby Shot Me Down)” uses guitar reverb and slow, deliberate whispering to imbue a story of destroyed childhood love with striking grace. Luis Bacalov’s “The Grand Duel – (Porte Prima)” instantly rockets listeners back to their childhood dreams of being the good cowboy in the final gunfight. “Green Hornet” swings in a way that recalls the glory days of Benny Goodman, and “Don’t Let Me Be Misunderstood” is a ten-minute epic that leaves us feeling as if we’ve gone through an entire romance within the song’s borders, with all the high and low points.

For better or worse, RZA’s presence has made the soundtrack’s ethos more Ghost Dog than Reservoir Dogs. Sonny Chiba should be proud that his legacy has paid off so handsomely. —Scoop A. Wasserstein

Mojave 3

Spoon and Rafter

(4AD)

If they sounded any more bummed, they’d only be good for salving broken hearts. Mojave 3 sound like Elliott Smith might if he had been dumped by his girlfriend somewhere below the Bible belt—swoony folk with a country bent. Yet despite the relentless heartache of their lyrics, Spoon and Rafter is an undercover upbeat album, suffused with an insistent gleam of sunshine.

It is hard to pinpoint exactly where this gleam comes from. Frontman Halstead’s vocals are as whisperingly fragile as on his recent solo album, Sleeping on Roads. The instrumentation is a sort of chamber country affair, with pedal steel and keyboards filling out the central piano and guitar. The key may be the inspired use of space—the music never builds to more than a jaunty bounce (as on “Billy Oddity”). A plangent line like “It’s hard to miss you,” sung repeatedly over a simplistic piano progression, would sound like a botched Coldplay outtake in anyone else’s hands, but Mojave manage to steer it from the brink.

Part of the secret is the surreptitious highlights in the music. “The Battle of the Broken Hearts ” subtly blends chimes into the folksy piano, while the band brings a juicy Hammond organ along for the ride on “Tinkers Blues”. But the fact is that this is good songwriting: these could be played as rock songs at double the tempo and still sound good. It’s just that Mojave 3 like the swoony sound. If you feel the need to swoon, or simply sigh enigmatically, check this out. —Andrew R. Iliff