The next review is about as far from eighties metal as you can get.
Disc 386 is...O Brother Where Art Thou
Artist: Various
Year of Release: 2000
What’s Up With The Cover?: As is common with a soundtrack, a promotion of the movie – here we have George Clooney, John Turturro and Tim Blake Nelson escaping prison, in an early scene in the film. I like the whimsical feel of this cover, which nicely captures the music on the album.
How I Came To Know It: Long ago Sheila convinced me that every Cohen Brothers movie is worth seeing, usually more than once. We both really like “O Brother Where Art Thou” and from the moment we saw it, loved the music. We bought the soundtrack very shortly after seeing the film.
How It Stacks Up: I have twenty-four or so soundtracks. With this many it is hard to figure where each stacks up, and looking back over my reviews I see a lot fell into ‘middle of the pack’. I was determined to be more definitive this time and did a much more detailed analysis. I’m putting this album 14th. Good, but middle of the pack.
Rating: 3 stars.
When we first got this record Sheila and I played it a lot, so I was expecting to like it a lot more when the dice gods selected it for the next review. Consequently I was disappointed when it turned out to be good, but not great. Expectation is a powerful force.
The movie “O Brother Where Art Thou” is a very loose retelling of Homer’s “The Odyssey” except that it takes place in depression era United States and is a comedy instead of an epic.
The music is a perfect fit for the movie, and is a mix of old originals, remakes and new music written in an early Americana style (a mix of gospel, bluegrass, blues and old standards). The music is carefully chosen, and the love that both the Cohen brothers and album producer T Bone Burnett have for the work is very evident.
Whatever style is at work, the production decisions keep it simple, recreating an early, folksy sound, except with the benefit of stereo (some people like that old mono sound, but I’m not one of them).
Some of the standouts for me are deep south proto-blues tracks like “Po’ Lazarus” and “O Death,” which capture the despair of not just the Great Depression, but what that Great Depression would be like for people living in abject poverty before it even started. “Po’ Lazarus” has a great production decision, sung by the prison chain gang at the beginning of the movie, with the sound of hammers breaking rock serving for percussion.
On the other side, is the sweet voice of modern bluegrass legend Alison Krauss singing the gospel song, “Down To The River To Pray,” which is some five star praise music. Later, she teams up with fellow ‘sirens’ Emmylou Harris and Gillian Welch for more hard livin’ fair with “Didn’t Leave Nobody But The Baby.” Generally, the songs featuring Krauss are the best, and it was nice to see this record propel her into a mainstream audience after being rightfully famous in bluegrass circles for many years prior.
Other songs didn’t inspire me the same, but fit the movie nicely, such “You Are My Sunshine,” “Keep On The Sunny Side” and “In the Highways,” old time sing-a-longs that haven’t aged well. In the film they are used by various corrupt politicians to help get the crowds to view them favourably, and the irony really works. Removed from their context for the soundtrack they sound dated and irrelevant.
One of the sub-plots of the film is that Ulysses and his ‘crew’ - escaped convicts on the lam – record a song during their travels called “Man of Constant Sorrow” which becomes a radio hit. There are four versions of this song on the soundtrack. They are all good, and in the film the repetition helps bind scenes together. Just listening to the album however, made me pretty sick of it by the time the 4th version kicked in.
There are 19 songs on this record, which was again fine during the film, but way too many for any reasonably-lengthed record.
As I noted earlier, when I first heard all of these songs it was while watching “O Brother Where Art Thou” the film, and they fit so nicely that the glow stuck with me for many years after when just listening to the soundtrack. With some distance from that experience, the album is still strong, but it loses a little bit without the Cohen brother's full vision. Twelve years later it makes for an album where I’m more likely to cherry pick some of the standouts, and skip the others, and so taken as a whole, I must reluctantly grade it out as good but not great.
1 comment:
"Po' Lazarus" is actually a field recording of a real chain gang. The hammers you hear are real (except they're not hammers - the prisoners are chopping wood, not breaking rock).
There's a great story about this song. As mentioned, the song is a field recording, made by folk music historian Alan Lomax in 1959. The lead singer's name was James Carter, but the chorus has remained anonymous.
When the film was being scored, the producers tracked down James Carter and paid him $20,000 for the use of the song, despite the fact that James didn't even remember singing it. Since no one knows the other prisoners' names, the song is credited to "James Carter and the Prisoners".
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