Pitchfork

Oh man, that was sassy back in 1995 when Robert Pollard sang on Alien Lanes: "I write music for soundtracks now/ That's what I wanted to do anyhow." One could imagine that he was referencing a random jetsetter, or perhaps even Randy Newman, who went from making controversial concept albums in the 70s to being a Disney schmaltz-slut. Here we are in 2002, though, and Stephin Merritt, Jeff Tweedy, Belle & Sebastian, Air, Will Oldham, Badly Drawn Boy, Tom Waits, Public Enemy, Björk, and Yo La Tengo (to name just a few) have all done scores for films of varying magnitudes. I had a dry, academic, insightful, philosophical theory about this trend-- the kind of gesture that typically earns me great letters from our UK readers-- but the Pitchfork bossman says for us to forego the dry, academic, insightful, philosophical bent, and keep things short and funny. So forgive me, my British friends, and hey, who farted? (lol)

Now, the ever-ascendant ex-Archers of Loaf and current Crooked Fingers mastermind Eric Bachmann has tried his giant elastic hands at soundtracking Ball of Wax, a film in which a talking dog (voiced by Chris Tucker) uses the World Wide Web to defeat a gang of sexy homeless vampires. Okay, I haven't seen it. The movie's website, which is good enough to link to our recent archived interview with Bachmann (in which he expressed a desire to develop more scores), says it's about how "an evil baseball player turns the game into a blood sport by pitting his teammates-- the Carolina Devils-- against one other in violent competitions." So I was close.

Thing is, Bachmann's already released a tremendous, spooky-soundtrackish album, his 1995 team-up with Ben Folds under the name Barry Black. That album's soothing, lasting grumble-and-buzz gets unfairly maligned as sounding Latin Playboys-esque and Waits-ish, as if they own the patent on trombones and vibraphones lurching across transplanted Eastern European/South American graveyards. Only this album's "Jimmy the Enforcer" and "Aspirin and Arsenic" revisit that mood, but they do so to microwave-gothic winsome effect.

Before I'd heard this CD, I was weighing whether or not to make those weird concessions that reviewers grant for these kinds of projects ("give'm a break, this ain't the real thing, it's movie-goop") when my adopted son Svelgph asked, "Father figure, if takes up as much mass and time as a regular CD, and it costs as much, why treat it otherwise?" Short Careers is coherent enough, though, to survive the test wrought by Svelgph's untainted vision. Except for the still-good-but-tone-breaching "Reach Out and Touch Someone", which gets interestingly dissonant but is inhibited by its role as the "tense climactic scene" piece, this album is a satisfying suite whose every number expertly juggles two conflicting and complementary themes.

The stilted lilt of "Good Morning Sleepyhead" is worth the asking price, a cartoon-triumphant march that suggests colossal innocence. When the track erupts into crowd noise, its significance as a wordless entity manifests. Only the brief "Nosebleed" is equally Fingular. The rest reveals another side of Bachmann, replete with ominous pianos and icily melodramatic strings. He never creeps into Corky Elfman territory, and he keeps the proceedings from getting too chambery by layering everything with those repetitive digital undercurrents he's been toying with since 1996's All the Nation's Airports-- occasionally even seasoning the mix with some industrial turbulence or echoing valves.

But while Bachmann's compositions never evoke a climate of first-day-with-the-new-cellist, they aren't as blazingly original as his work elsewhere. "The Mysterious Death of Robert Tower" comes close to lifting a line from a famous piece of classical music that my high-cultureless self only knows from a jewelry commercial. The pregnant, plaintive plucking of "Finding the Wholes Filling the Gaps" is reminiscent of Angelo Badalamenti's self-consciously downhome soundtrack for The Straight Story. The pained, galvanic mainline of the score, which undergoes several revisitations after one first hears it on "A Diamond Is the Devil's Eye", cannot help but summon Clint Mansell and the Kronos Quartet's actuating, tragic accompaniment to Requiem for a Dream.

By the luscious, balmy, slothfully sweeping closer "Ty Cobb," however, you won't have a care in the world except for how this record exacts sweet vengeance on the extracurricular junior-high band experiments committed to tape by Rachel's. Like so many instrumental efforts, this burnished opus is excellent for studying, bundling, and watering the cacti. I can't wait to see what Múm whip up for American Dink, that new Adam Sandler movie about the horny misfit jock.