Reviews
 Keep It Simple
Van Morrison
Roger McGuinn @ the Huntington IMAC, Long Island, NY - April 4, 2008
Emily Saxe @ the Allen Room/Jazz at Lincoln Center - April 5, 2008
Another Country
Tift Merritt
Be Your Own Pet
Get Awkward
Paul McCartney – The McCartney Years (DVD)
Juno – Music from the Motion Picture
Various Artists
Yes - Their Definitive Story
Day and Night Driving
Seven Mary Three
InterMedia Arts Center 2/2/08
Huntington, NY
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Various Artists
I hear that ‘Juno’ is a pretty good movie. Actually, word on the street is that it’s a great movie, but I couldn’t tell you, because I haven’t seen it yet. One of the saddest parts of trying to maintain a life while covering so many aspects of musical culture is that you don’t get to see a lot of movies. My view of culture is totally lopsided, because I hear about 50 different CD’s in a month, but I’m lucky if I can see even one movie in the same timeframe.
Lucky for me, you don’t have to see ‘Juno’ to appreciate the soundtrack (although I’m sure that everyone who has will say that it most certainly helps). Most soundtracks are a mishmash of unrelated tracks thrown together into one collection because each suits a particular scene in the movie, but they have no common thread. ‘Juno’ is different. Each song on this soundtrack blends with the others in a nearly seamless manner that reflects on and compliments those around it. The artists are diverse, including Belle and Sebastian, Sonic Youth, the Velvet Underground, Buddy Holly and Cat Power. These artists have little in common, but as heard here, there is a commonality that defines a mood and a theme (that obviously must represent that of the movie, which as I said, I did not yet see…)
Kimya Dawson (the female half of Moldy Peaches) provides the glue that stitches all these disparate artists together. Her songs convey an appealing naiveté and a fey charm that somehow spreads into the entire soundtrack. She contributes a half-dozen songs here, and the result is a bit disarming. Few bands could be more different than Sonic Youth and Belle and Sebastian, but as heard here, a casual listener could be forgiven for thinking that one artist performs the entire soundtrack. As listener, I almost feel as if I’m watching the movie (that I never saw…). Maybe one day I’ll rectify my lapse in judgment and see the film when it gets released on DVD. Meanwhile, I can imagine how good it is by playing the remarkably homogenous soundtrack.
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