Various Artists: 50 First Dates

50 First Dates: Love Songs from the Original Motion Picture

(Maverick)

In winter weather, every chance to escape into the sunshine is gladly taken. So if you need some summertime music to help survive these months, then go get a copy of the soundtrack for 50 First Dates. By taking a handful of well-known 80’s songs and remixing them with a reggae twist to fit the movie’s Jamaican setting, this disc delightfully combines the cheesy and spicy elements that every annoyingly catchy summertime song needs. Wayne Wonder’s rendition of “Hold Me Now” is so catchy it could very well be a big hit when it is released as a single this month. Other standouts include UB40’s performance of the Police hit “Every Breath You Take” and Wycleff Jean and Eve’s “Your Love”, a remix that is hard not to get up and dance to.

But not all the tracks are hits. Adam Sandler’s own effort, “Forgetful Lucy”, should be forgotten and never played again. Stick to the unoriginal comedies Adam. And although most of the songs on the album have been remixed ad nauseam, this is the first time Spandau Ballet’s “True” has been turned into a rap song, but to unfortunate results; I fear Gary Kemp would not approve as WILL.I.AM and FERGIE manage to ruin a classic love song that has been a favorite for many years.

All in all, the soundtrack for The Wedding Singer…I mean 50 First Dates, is worthy of a thumbs up. Let’s just hope it will get us through the wind chill factor of the next months until the summer rolls around.

—Elsa B. O’Riain

Einsturzende Neubauten

Perpetuum Mobile

(Mute)

The first time I heard a Neubauten song, I was scared out of my wits—their 1985 album, “Halber Mensch,” opened with a maelstrom of shrieking in semi-decipherable German. Einsturzende Neubauten’s new album Perpetuum Mobile is mellower. While there’s a surprising absence of drills and metal chainsaws, their fondness for power tools and machines is still carried by the airy bellows of plastic tubing, three air compressors, electric fans and large amplified metal springs.

It’s not just their love of sound which defines Neubauten,, but the worlds they conjure. “Ein seltener Vogel” is a sumptuous blend of bird calls and prehistoric drones which convey a dawning sense of catastrophe. With the surging tornadoes of “Ozean und Brandung” and the metallic calm of “Boreas,” the album depicts an expansive sonic landscape with hidden stormy undercurrents unleashed every so often. For the most part, the album is melodic and melancholy, with heartbreaking lyrical outbursts like “Ein leichtes leises Sauseln.”

There’s something intimate and oddly beautiful about Perpetuum Mobile. As vocalist Blixa Bargeld softly utters “was habe ich? / was habe ich nicht” (what do I have? / what don’t I have?) in “Selbstportrait mit Kater,” memories harken back to ’70’s Berlin when the then-young Bargeld and percussionist N.U.Unruh picked metal trash off the streets and, for the first time, beat out their existential angst on the overpass on the Autobahn. “Perpetuum Mobile” inherits the drama of it all with just a tinge of self-mockery beneath the gloom.

—Zhenzhen Lu

Electrelane

The Power Out

(Too Pure / Beggars Group)

If the term art-pop conjures up images of archly obscurantist noise bands with a heady disdain for melody, think again. It would be hard to be more artsy than Brighton, U.K.-based quartet Electrelane. On their first album, they eschewed the use of vocals (classy), but for “The Power Out”, their debut album for indie label Beggars Group, frontwoman Verity Susman (classier) has contributed vocals in four different languages (classiest). And get this: the English words on “The Valleys” are from a Siegried Sassoon poem, while the German ones on “This Deed” are from The Gay Science—by Nietzsche.

So with their art credentials well and truly established, and a gallery show for the album in the offing (seriously), what does the music sound like? Susman’s deadpan delivery and the occasionally cerebral music are a little arch at times. On “Oh Sombra,” Susman’s voice appears deliberately quavery, overpowered by the gathering waves of chiming guitars and snowballing drums. Yet the album never abandons the ideal of pop music, taking some surprising and ambitious turns in order to keep the pretensions light-footed. The garage strut of “Take The Bit Between Your Teeth” sounds like Jack White might if he were a girl, and went to art college. But Susman has some vocal chops entirely her own: the supersonic double punch she delivers on “On Parade” is neither screech nor wail, but somewhere between a radar ping and a rock ‘n roll yelp. In fact, for all its artsyness, the music is irrepressibly, slyly cool, from the sly strut that accompanies Mr. Sassoon to the lush indie-pop of “Enter Smiling.” If all art were this much fun, museums would have happy hours.

—Andrew R. Iliff

Savath & Savalas

Apropa’t

(Warp)

Perhaps the ultimate appeal of Scott Herren’s music is how he always gets things wrong. Not purposely irreverent or consciously malfunctioning, his work simply sounds half-executed with an air of open experimentation. Under his Prefuse 73 alias, he chops Hip-Hop beats in a manner more akin to Mille Plateaux glitch artists like Farben and Vladislav Delay than to DJ Premier. But in doing so, he cuts off their potential to groove, making his compositions as involuted and intricate as the best of Warp’s back catalogue.

Prefuse’s melodies are barely articulated, coloring his beats in two or three translucent shades. Herren clearly has little melodic training. Accompanied by singer Eva Puyuelo and a small band on the new Savath & Savalas album, his abstract tendencies lead to constructive conflict. The original songs, recorded with live horns, keys and drums, are hollowed-out, taken apart and re-stitched until they’re nothing more than a series of textures floating dreamily. Herren’s additions—subtle crackles, blips and melodic tweaks—give potentially evocative recordings a strikingly dull sheen, like tarnished silver. His electronic smudges obscure Puyuelo and musicians just enough to make it all a lazy game of finding the ghost in the shell.

The songs on “Apropa’t” are distinctly more compelling than Herren’s beat-driven material. As Prefuse, he carves useless sculptures out of head-nod functionalism; as Savath & Savalas, his explorations turn “real” music into dense head music. Given the studio treatment, mournful songs like “Te Quiero Pero Por Otro Lado…” and “Um Girassol de Cor de Seu Cabelo” become confused and hazy, blurred beneath raindrops.

–Ryan J. Kuo