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I loaned my copy of the Repo Man soundtrack to a friend the other day. Before giving it to him I listened to it for the first time in years and was reminded just how brilliant an album it is. This got me thinking about movie soundtrack albums in general. In particular I wondered why so many are rather disappointing even though they contain some top music. I found that I have not owned many soundtrack albums which I have played over and over they way you do with something you really like. I think this is a consistency thing. The albums may contain great songs but they often contain stuff I don't like either - you have to go through the poorer material to get to the good stuff. Of course these days it is easier to cherry pick and put together a collection of just the songs that you like but then you aren't listening to the album, you are just listening to a few songs.
The reason for this is obvious now that I think about it a bit. The music selected for a film is not selected for the purposes of making a stand-alone album. It is selected for the purposes of complementing the action in the part of the movie it is played with. As the film progresses, the action changes and so the music changes. This is how it should be - the film is not about the music. The music is there to make the film better. As such it is unlikely that the music will fit together when separated from the action is is meant to complement. I don't mean incidental music, I mean songs played during the film, but I should note that incidental music never ever works for me in a soundtrack album. It only woks in conjunction with the on-screen action, so why include it in an album except to full space.
So if it is obvious why soundtrack albums shouldn't really work as a whole, then why are there a few soundtrack albums in existence that I really like as an entire whole. The answer for me is that not all films leave the music in the background. Sometimes the music becomes an important foreground character. This is the case in Repo Man and my personal all-time favourite movie soundtrack Dogs in Space as well as well known works like American Graffiti and The Big Chill. It is also the case for musicals, but I so very rarely like the music in musicals that it isn't relevant.
The above only applies to feature films. Things are a bit different with TV series where you have so much more screen time to pick the best work from. Even so, you cannot just throw a bunch of songs together. The first Buffy TV album shows what somebody can come up with when they put the effort in to construct a whole album rather than a collection of songs.
The reason for this is obvious now that I think about it a bit. The music selected for a film is not selected for the purposes of making a stand-alone album. It is selected for the purposes of complementing the action in the part of the movie it is played with. As the film progresses, the action changes and so the music changes. This is how it should be - the film is not about the music. The music is there to make the film better. As such it is unlikely that the music will fit together when separated from the action is is meant to complement. I don't mean incidental music, I mean songs played during the film, but I should note that incidental music never ever works for me in a soundtrack album. It only woks in conjunction with the on-screen action, so why include it in an album except to full space.
So if it is obvious why soundtrack albums shouldn't really work as a whole, then why are there a few soundtrack albums in existence that I really like as an entire whole. The answer for me is that not all films leave the music in the background. Sometimes the music becomes an important foreground character. This is the case in Repo Man and my personal all-time favourite movie soundtrack Dogs in Space as well as well known works like American Graffiti and The Big Chill. It is also the case for musicals, but I so very rarely like the music in musicals that it isn't relevant.
The above only applies to feature films. Things are a bit different with TV series where you have so much more screen time to pick the best work from. Even so, you cannot just throw a bunch of songs together. The first Buffy TV album shows what somebody can come up with when they put the effort in to construct a whole album rather than a collection of songs.