Categories
Albums

Best film soundtracks: Honourable mentions

And now for something completely different… er… perhaps just a mild change of pace.

I’ve been doing these ‘Best albums’ series pretty regularly since I started this blog close to 10 years ago. But up to now, each of these series have been focused on a specific year, whether it be an end of the year recap of faves or a fond nostalgic look back on a certain year. For my first ‘Best albums’ series of the year, however, I’ve decided instead to go thematic and focus on my favourite ever motion picture soundtracks.

Back when I was a teenager and into my early twenties, I was a rabid cinephile. Indeed, I almost spent as much time watching films as did listening to music. It was a love I got from my mother, who’d been watching films since her own youth and began collecting films as soon as they were available in a format to watch from home, first on VHS and later, DVD. The household collection grew quickly and I never wanted for something to watch. In fact, it was often a bigger problem and took a herculean effort to choose just one film. It wasn’t long before I had my own favourite actors, directors, and screenwriters that I would follow and typically knew when they had something new being released. After moving out of my childhood home, my film watching slowly waned and I eventually got to a point where I would watch films weekly rather than daily, quality rather than quantity.

Still, many of my favourite films are from the days of my youth. And of course, I still love sitting down to dig into a good flick. Maybe I won’t watch just anything these days but certain actors will always tempt, as will anything that focuses on writing and writers and to be sure, anything to do with music.

Which brings us back to the task at hand: film soundtracks. We’ll get down to my top ten favourites over the next few months but first, on this first day of February, I’m going to whet your appetite by sharing a handful of great soundtracks that didn’t quite make the cut.

Action!

21 (2008):  A slick and hip, indie-heavy soundtrack that perhaps even out-hipped the slick, heist film that was based upon but over-sensationalized real events.
Check out: “L.S.F. (Lost souls forever” Mark Ronson feat. Kasabian

24 hour party people (2002):  The soundtrack for the amazing biopic on Factory Records, Tony Wilson, and the Manchester scene features a number of artists, both well-known and lesser-known, associated with Factory.
Check out: “Love will tear us apart” Joy Division

Forrest Gump (1994):  A double album of strictly American musical artists that reflect and embody the three decades – from the 50s to the 80s – that we experience of Forrest Gump’s remarkable life.
Check out: “Turn! Turn! Turn!” The Byrds

Rocky Horror picture show (1975): The soundtrack of the cult film/musical/phenomenon features the film’s cast*  belting out those twisted numbers we all know and love.
Check out: “The time warp”

Stand by me (1986): Music from the 1980s film based on the Stephen King novella “The body” perfectly evokes being a teenager with your friends on an adventure at the end of summer in 1959*.
Check out: “Stand by me” Ben E. King

*Including Tim Curry, Susan Sarandon, Richard O’Brien, and Meat Loaf.

**Okay, I wasn’t there, but that’s how I imagine it. That’s certainly how it felt for me at that age in the 80s, but with different songs.

I’ll be back very soon with albums #10 through #6 for my Best film soundtracks list. In the meantime, you can check out my Best Albums page here if you’re interested in my other favourite albums lists.

Categories
Tunes

Best tunes of 1994: #24 Cranes “Shining road”

<< #25   |   #23 >>

Here’s another song by a band whose introduction came by way of a sampler. Yes, they really did work!

Back in the latter months of 1994, I was living in a basement apartment just north of Toronto while attending my second year at York University. Although it was definitely a shorter commute from that apartment than it was in my first year driving in from my hometown, it still meant hanging about on campus, killing time between classes, haunting the library, the student centre, the arcades and games rooms, and the pubs. At some point nearing the end of the fall term, I was in the campus general store* in the York Lanes Mall, perusing the magazine section for music mags. I came across one that I’d never heard of before called CMJ New Music Monthly and flipping through, saw names of artists I knew and respected, names I wouldn’t always see in the mainstream press, outside of the British music mags. I got to the end and saw a sampler CD was included and was impressed by the artists featured there as well. I was sold**.

The first track on the CD compilation was the Brauer mix of “Shining road” by Cranes and it hooked me right away with its haunting minimalist approach and the trademark childlike vocals of Alison Shaw. As it would turn out, my friend Tim*** was discovering the band concurrently while attending Waterloo university, about 100 kilometres away. The lucky jerk got to see them in March 1995 in Toronto and covered their show for his university paper. Granted, Cranes certainly fell neatly into Tim’s gothic, dark, and heavy musical oeuvre, which also included bands like Sisters of Mercy, New Model Army, KMFDM, and Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds.

Indeed, though the English alternative rock band has often been labelled as ‘Gothic’****, the band has not been happy about it. Cranes was formed by Alison Shaw and her brother Jim all the way back in 1985 and save for a brief hiatus near the end of the 90s, they were active until the end of the 2000s. They reformed again a couple of years ago for some shows and a new album in 2024. In all, they’ve released nine full-length studio albums, a couple of mini-albums, and a litany of EPs.

“She’s been making plans to go (you know)
Hit the bright lights, hit the road
To the city lights this time
Just don’t worry I’ll be fine”

“Shining road” is the opening track off Cranes’ third studio album, “Loved”. It catches your attention right away with those thumping ritualistic beats. The guitar strumming is restrained and taut, ominous and foreboding. At the chorus, though, things rev up considerably, to almost evil sounding levels. Yes, it plays the quiet-loud-quiet game, alternating between traipsing amongst dark clouds and stomping heavily through muddy puddles. Set all of that against the aforementioned childlike and haunting vocals by Alison Shaw and its pure magic. Pure black magic.

*Probably not the right name. I’m sure it’s long since closed.

**And blew a third of that week’s grocery budget in the process.

***It’s actually Tim’s birthday today. So this one goes out to you Tim!

****I included the very song that is the subject of today’s post on a “Goth” playlist I created and posted to these pages almost seven years ago.

For the rest of the Best tunes of 1994 list, click here.

Categories
Playlists

Playlist: 75 tunes from 1991

Here’s a good long Apple Music playlist that could get you through an afternoon of chores, painting, or cooking. Perhaps a road trip from Toronto to Montreal. Or keep you company on a flight from North America to Europe.

I’ve done a few playlists over the years on this blog but never any that focused on the music of a particular year in the past. I’ve chosen to start with 1991 because it was particularly pivotal year for me in terms of musical discovery. It was the year that I started to dip my toes into alternative rock, a brave new world for me, a wave of music that included a huge variety of styles, very little of which sounded like the music of my parents. So even though I wasn’t listening to all of these songs at the time, I’d say that the majority are old friends, intimate acquaintances.

There’s seventy-five great tracks, representative of how I saw 1991. It’s not a ‘best of’. I’ve already done the list of my top thirty favourite tracks on this blog here. Some of the songs in that list appear on this playlist but there’s plenty others here and some that are much deeper cuts. I know that there are those of you out there who might catch some obvious omissions. Some of these might have been because they were not to my tastes but there are others, like My Bloody Valentine’s “Soon” or The Real People’s “Open up your mind (let me in)”, that were not available to be added due to music rights and Apple Music or whatever. Still, there’s so many other gems that show the wide range of music that was coming out in those years just before Grunge exploded and changed everything for alternative rock.

For those who don’t use Apple Music, here is the entire playlist, with links to YouTube videos for each song:

  1. Primal Scream “Loaded”
  2. Vic Reeves & The Wonder Stuff “Dizzy”
  3. Blur “Sing”
  4. Teenage Fanclub “Star Sign”
  5. Lowest of the Low “Subversives”
  6. Electronic “Getting Away With It”
  7. Throwing Muses “Not Too Soon”
  8. Red Hot Chili Peppers “Under the Bridge”
  9. James “Sit Down”
  10. Chapterhouse “Mesmerise”
  11. R.E.M. “Belong”
  12. Spacemen 3 “I Love You”
  13. Robyn Hitchcock & The Egyptians “So You Think You’re In Love”
  14. EMF “Unbelievable”
  15. Crash Test Dummies “Androgynous”
  16. The Mighty Mighty Bosstones “Where’d You Go”
  17. Pixies “Alec Eiffel”
  18. Levellers “Liberty Song”
  19. Big Audio Dynamite II “The Globe”
  20. Spin Doctors “Two Princes”
  21. Depeche Mode “Death’s Door”
  22. Slowdive “Catch The Breeze”
  23. Rheostatics “Record Body Count”
  24. Siouxsie & The Banshees “Kiss Them For Me”
  25. Jesus Jones “Right Here, Right Now”
  26. Northside “My Rising Star”
  27. Primus “Tommy the Cat”
  28. Morrissey “Sing Your Life”
  29. Pearl Jam “Jeremy”
  30. Ned’s Atomic Dustbin “Grey Cell Green”
  31. Big Audio Dynamite II “Rush”
  32. Ministry “Jesus Built My Hotrod”
  33. Paris Angels “Perfume (Loved Up)”
  34. Barenaked Ladies “Lovers In A Dangerous Time”
  35. Saint Etienne “Only Love Can Break Your Heart”
  36. Primal Scream “Come Together”
  37. Teenage Fanclub “The Concept”
  38. Billy Bragg “Everywhere”
  39. The Farm “All Together Now”
  40. Crash Test Dummies “The Ghosts That Haunt Me”
  41. Inspiral Carpets “Caravan”
  42. Morrissey “Mute Witness”
  43. The Tragically Hip “Little Bones”
  44. R.E.M. “Me In Honey”
  45. Meat Puppets “Sam”
  46. The Wonder Stuff “Welcome To The Cheap Seats”
  47. U2 “One”
  48. The Charlatans “Over Rising”
  49. Erasure “Chorus”
  50. Lowest of the Low “Henry Needs a New Pair of Shoes”
  51. Violent Femmes “American Music”
  52. Spirit of the West “D For Democracy”
  53. Blur “She’s So High”
  54. Spirea X “Chlorine Dream”
  55. Chapterhouse “Pearl”
  56. The Grapes Of Wrath “You May Be Right”
  57. The Dylans “Godlike”
  58. Lenny Kravitz “It Ain’t Over ‘Til It’s Over”
  59. Levellers “One Way”
  60. Revolver “Heaven Sent an Angel”
  61. Barenaked Ladies “If I Had $1,000,000”
  62. Swervedriver “Rave Down”
  63. Rheostatics “Aliens (Christmas 1988)”
  64. Billy Bragg “Accident Waiting To Happen”
  65. The Farm “Hearts & Minds”
  66. Spirit Of The West “Far Too Canadian”
  67. Ned’s Atomic Dustbin “Kill Your Television”
  68. Odds “Love Is The Subject”
  69. R.E.M. “Losing My Religion”
  70. Pixies “Head On”
  71. Northside “Take Five”
  72. U2 “Until the End of the World”
  73. Blur “There’s No Other Way”
  74. Lowest of the Low “Rosy and Grey”
  75. Nirvana “Smells Like Teen Spirit”

And here is the promised link to the Apple Music playlist. I hope you enjoy.

If you’re interested in checking out any of the other playlists I’ve created and shared on these pages, you can peruse them here.