Harmony Korine generally does a good job limning his films with marginal music appropriate to the subjects, from Lou Barlow’s vaguely menacing sludge-pop snippets in Kids to the black-metal-outlined disturbia of Gummo (Slipknot’s favorite film, unsurprisingly), though it’s never truly “out.” He’s hit the aesthetic nail on the head again by enlisting Spiritualized/Spacemen 3’s Jason “J. Spaceman” Pierce and Sun City Girls to compose for the weird-but-not-quite-“vintage,” faded-color, old-stock-film photography of Mister Lonely, judging by the stills in the liner notes. But, unfortunately, that’s all there is to judge by as of yet: the movie, a festival-only darling thus far, will only see a limited national release starting in May. Worse, the name can be misleading, since the two artists didn’t actually collaborate on any of these songs, which would have been the real selling point.
This gently bizarre music sounds like it should be appropriate for a movie based around a sunny commune of celebrity impersonators and probably makes perfect sense bouncing around between the walls of Korine’s skull, but that’s also the problem. These sketch-songs are more score than soundtrack, and divorced from their visual/narrative context, these twinkly, watery keys and guitars don’t actually hold a lot of water. It’s unfair to review music like this apart from the movie, but such is the tyranny of the release date.
Sun City Girls fare better than Mr. Spaceman here, maybe because the overall feel of the set hews slightly closer to the Girls’ standard-issue aesthetic than Spiritualized or Spacemen 3. While they pass off serviceable turns on “Spook,” “Mr. Lonely Viola” and “Vine Street Piano,” “3D Girls” is the only tune here that feels satisfyingly self-contained and the only one I’d really listen to on its own merits. That’s not to say the other songs are bad, but 20 disunited little morsels of incidental music do not an opus make, unless your name is Morricone. Spaceman starts to catch up towards the end with “Musicbox Underwater” and “Paris Beach,” but his other doodles are just a little too doodly to care much about (“Pope in the Bath” still gets points for its title alone). There are plenty of better records you could put on for a sunny, sleepy afternoon, not least among which is Spaceman’s own forthcoming Songs in A&E with Spiritualized, which will justly demand much more of your and everyone else’s attention.
More about: J. Spaceman and Sun City Girls
