Tag: Alternative Rock

Albums

Best film soundtracks: Albums #10 through #6

Post author By jprobichaud
Post date February 17, 2026
1 Comment on Best film soundtracks: Albums #10 through #6

Just over a couple of weeks ago I gave a sneak preview into my new “Best albums” series and provided a handful of ‘honourable mentions’ just to whet your appetite. If you missed that post, go on back and check it out. I’ll wait. If you’ve already perused that piece, you’d know that I am (or at least I was) almost as big a fan of films as I am of music.

What I didn’t mention two weeks ago is that I’ve never been a huge collector of film soundtracks. No. As much as I appreciate how the choice of music can elevate a film immeasurably, how much I enjoy well placed songs and picking and pointing them out when I recognize them, it’s a rare thing for me to want to sit down and listen to film soundtrack more than just the one time. The albums in this list will represent the exceptions to the rule. These are soundtracks that are not just great accompaniments to the films for which they were compiled but are also great listens in their own right. In some cases, they perfectly evoke the feeling of the films and remind of particular scenes. In others, the compilations stand on their own, even transcending the films to become a cultural phenomenon.

In today’s post, I’ll share albums ten through six of my list of ten favourite film soundtracks. Then, I’ll share the top five, giving each their due in their own post, over the next month or so, interspersed with the other lists that I’ve got on the go. As always, I welcome your comments and perhaps your own favourite soundtracks as we go.

Let’s start.

#10 “Marie Antoinette” (2006)

Sofia Coppola often used indie music to great effect in her films, especially in her early work. Her third feature length film was a biography on Marie Antoinette, beginning with her being married off to the dauphin of France and ending at the eruption of the French Revolution. If you put on the soundtrack without context, you likely wouldn’t guess the story it was meant to help tell, but accompanying the highly stylized film, it was perfect. Mostly pulled from the original wave of post punk and new wave of the 80s, which was seeing a resurgence in indie rock during the time that the film was released. Great tunes by Siouxsie and the Banshees, New Order, The Cure, and a well-placed “I want candy” by Bow Wow Wow, but the real treat was two tracks by newer indie rockers The Radio Dept., who I was just falling in love with at the time.

#9 “Clueless” (1995)

A retelling of Jane Austen’s Emma, disguised as a teen rom-com, set in Beverley Hills? AS IF! It starred a very young Alicia Silverstone and Paul Rudd in their earliest film roles, was mildly successful in the theatres but gained traction on video, and has become something of a cult classic. Of course, in the 90s, when alt rock was king, film soundtracks had a habit of playing like a mixed tape of the hottest things or the about-to-be hottest things. “Clueless” had to be hip to be a hit with the teen audience it was targeting and it didn’t fail. It starts with some interesting covers by The Muffs (Kim Wilde), Cracker (Flamin’ Groovies), and Counting Crows (Psychedelic Furs) and rounds things out with some hit Britpop (Radiohead, Lightning Seeds, Supergrass), my favourite Bosstones track, and introduced me to The Smoking Popes.

#8 “Fear & loathing in Las Vegas” (1998)

“We were somewhere around Barstow, on the edge of the desert, when the drugs began to take hold.” I remember being super hyped when I first heard that “Fear & loathing”, one of my favourite books at the time, was being adapted for the screen by Terry Gilliam and would star Johnny Depp and Benicio Del Toro in the principal roles. I went to see it in the theatre with my friend Crissy at the Promenade Mall north of Toronto and we howled all the way through, even as the half-empty theatre drained by half that, even before the quarter mark of the film. The soundtrack features psychedelic rock of 60s, notably, Jefferson Airplane’s “White rabbit” which features prominently in a particular scene in the book, as well as Vegas residency crooners (like Tom Jones and Perry Como). Dialogue bits by Depp and Del Toro lead into most of the tracks and are interspersed between them, as if Depp is narrating the soundtrack as he does the film. A drug fuelled trip chasing the American dream.

#7 “Vanilla sky” (2001)

Back at the end of the 90s, Tom Cruise convinced Cameron Crowe (who he had worked with on “Jerry Maguire”) to remake Spanish-language film “Abre los ojos”. I went to see it in the theatre, not for Cruise, but because I’d always admired Crowe’s work. I remember enjoying it at the time but remember very little of the film, save for its surreal quality and how it was left open to the audiences’ interpretation as to what was real and what was not. Of course, Crowe’s soundtrack contributes to the dreaminess of it all. On paper it might seem eclectic, ranging from R.E.M. to Bob Dylan to The Monkees and Peter Gabriel, but collected together, it’s a beautiful thing. Indeed, this soundtrack completely changed my outlook on “Solsbury hill” and “Sweetness follows” and it also introduced me to Iceland ambient rock band Sigur Rós. Lovely stuff.

#6 “(500) Days of Summer” (2009)

“This is a story of boy meets girl. But you should know upfront that this is not a love story.” “(500) days of summer” is an indie non-romantic comedy that stars Joseph Gordon-Levitt and indie it-girl Zooey Deschanel as its two principals. Their story was not straightforward but it was bound to end in heartbreak. Of course, it was. It had its start in a shared love of The Smiths. In a film where the music was almost a third piece in a love triangle, an integral character, the soundtrack would without a doubt be something special. It plays like a mixed tape put together by Tom and Summer from their collective collections, featuring Doves, Black Lips, Hall & Oates (!), Feist, Regina Spector, Simon & Garfunkel, and unsurprisingly, The Smiths. And if you get the deluxe editions, you get the songs performed by Joseph Gordon-Levitt (Pixies’ “Here comes your man”) and Zooey Deschanel (Nancy Sinatra’s “Sugar town”) during the karaoke scene. Definitely a compilation as fun as the film it accompanies.

Stay tuned for album #5 on this list. In the meantime, you can check out my Best Albums page here if you’re interested in my other favourite albums lists.

Tags 1990s, 2000s, Alternative, Alternative Rock, Indie, Indie rock, Psychedelic, Soundtrack

Tunes

Best tunes of 2020: #8 No Joy “Birthmark”

Post author By jprobichaud
Post date February 13, 2026
1 Comment on Best tunes of 2020: #8 No Joy “Birthmark”

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It’s been just shy of four months since we last visited this series counting down my favourite tunes of 2020.

I don’t know that I’ve stayed away on purpose. I do have a few series on the go and the usual end of year festivities often take up lots of blog space. However, I admit that I’ve been finding 2020 an odd year to look back upon of late. Sure there was lots of great music being produced with all these musicians locked up with nothing else to do, but the rest of us were also locked up. It often feels like a lost year* and I’m sure I’m not alone with this feeling.

Indeed, every time I sat down to write this post, I found myself getting distracted by something else. Most recently, I went down the rabbit hole of looking at the timelines and the numbers of the COVID pandemic and it brought it all back. It’s perhaps easy to forget how bad things looked early on and all the fear and uncertainty. The numbers of the rates of infection, how quickly things spread, and how many deaths there were early on. Faced with the stats, it made me think how bad things could have gotten if it weren’t for the measures taken and for the mass roll outs of the vaccines worldwide. I remembered the empty grocery shelves, the low gas prices, the almost daily trips to Costco in search of toilet paper and disinfectant wipes. The stories of resilience, human nature winning out, images of deserted streets of some of the world’s biggest cities, and that video of Italian seniors singing together from the windows of each of their homes.

That last reminded me about all the stories coming out of the seniors facilities during the lockdowns. Hearing how the virus ran rampant through each of them, despite the valiant efforts of staff. How it hit certain residents hard, given their age and in some cases, already poor health, how the mortality rate was even higher. How the isolation made things even harder for loved ones to check in on family members in these homes. The word was that some were terribly frightened, remembering the previous pandemic of their youth, and some were not really understanding what was going on and feeling abandoned. And though I’m sure things are quite different and much improved in these facilities nowadays, I met and spoke to a few seniors when I was in the hospital last year and heard some stories and got a different perspective. Imagine, preferring to stay in the hospital than to return to your ‘home’.

Which brings me back to the real subject of today’s post. “Birthmark”, the number eight song on this list of my favourite tunes from 2020, was actually inspired by Jasamine White-Gluz, frontwoman and driving force behind Montreal’s No Joy, visiting a relative in senior living facility a few years before the pandemic. It’s not a protest song or a call to arms for seniors rights but it does shine a light on their humanity.

“Oh I braid your veins
Our old limbs are hard to break
No Matter when
Every lung has a line to trace”

As I wrote when No Joy’s fourth long player hit number four on my Best albums list at the end of 2020, the “opening track on the album and very first peek at the project’s first new album in five years hits like a ton of bricks. It’s the sound of 90s shoegaze gone 90s alternative dance. Think Chapterhouse’s second album “Blood music” or anything by Curve. Like the rest of the album, Jasamine White-Gluz had a lot of fun with this one in the studio, finding use for a set of bongos and apparently, a broken clarinet. The bongos are definitely front and centre and form the basis of a dance floor beckoning drum rhythm but I challenge you to point out the clarinet in the wall of sound she’s created in the loops and loops and loops.”

*There’s been a couple of those for me in the last five…

For the rest of the Best tunes of 2020 list, click here.

Tags 2020, 2020s, Alternative, Alternative Rock, Best tunes, Canadian indie, Dream Pop, Indie, Indie rock, Jasamine White-Gluz, No Joy, Shoegaze

Tunes

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

Post author By jprobichaud
Post date January 28, 2026
1 Comment on 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.