CD Odyssey Disc 942: Soundtrack

I meant to write this review last night but after a long and late night at the office I was knackered and opted instead for a couple TV shows and bed. Fortunately, I love this record so an extra day with it was no sacrifice.

Disc 942 is….True Detective Soundtrack

Artist: Various Artists, but a lot of Lera Lynn

Year of Release: 2015

What’s up with the Cover? It looks like the promotional poster for Season Two of True Detective. From left to right we have: a crooked cop, a mobster trying to go legit, an angry cop and a cop with PTSD. It’s not a happy show.

How I Came To Know It: Sheila and I loved the show and the music it featured was always great. By happy accident while looking for someone to see in Nashville, I discovered that Lera Lynn was the mysterious singer in the background of the bar seasons in Season Two. From there it was a simple matter of looking for the soundtrack, which (happily) features music from both seasons.

How It Stacks Up:  I have a lot of soundtracks. I had originally finished reviewing them back at Disc 479, but had forgotten there were a bunch of albums that qualify as soundtracks that I file with the artist that did them. Since I’m now up the 31 soundtracks total, it is probably time to revisit the list. Take a deep breath, because it is long. You’ll note that “True Detective” lands impressively at number four.

1.  The Harder They Come: 4 stars (reviewed at Disc 371)
2. Saturday Night Fever: 4 stars (reviewed at Disc 392)
3. Hedwig and the Angry Inch: 4 stars (reviewed at Disc 225).
4. True Detective: 4 stars (reviewed right here)
5. The Matrix:  4 stars (reviewed at Disc 291)
6. Magnolia:  4 stars (reviewed at Disc 181)
7. Crooklyn:  4 stars (reviewed at Disc 75)
8. Swingers:  4 stars (reviewed at Disc 12)
9. A Kind of Magic: 3 stars (reviewed at Disc 749)
10. Flash Gordon: 3 stars (reviewed at Disc 659)
11. Pat Garrett & Billy the Kid: 3 stars (reviewed at Disc 681)
12. Into the Wild:  3 stars (reviewed at Disc 260)
13. Pulp Fiction:  3 stars (reviewed at Disc 102)
14. Elizabethtown:  3 stars (reviewed at Disc 33)
15. Highway 61:  3 stars (reviewed at Disc 230)
16. O Brother Where Art Thou:  3 stars (reviewed at Disc 386)
17. Buffy The Vampire Slayer:  3 stars (reviewed at Disc 216)
18. Reservoir Dogs:  3 stars (reviewed at Disc 116)
19. Jackie Brown:  3 stars (reviewed at Disc 30)
20. Transamerica:  3 stars (reviewed at Disc 402)
21. Les Miserables:  3 stars (reviewed at Disc 111)
22. Big Night:  2 stars (reviewed at Disc 215)
23. The Warriors:  2 stars (reviewed at Disc 479)
24. James Bond:  2 stars (reviewed at Disc 103)
25. One From the Heart: 2 stars (reviewed at Disc 935)
26. About a Boy:  2 stars (reviewed at Disc 252)
27. Chess:  2 stars (reviewed at Disc 156)
28. Honeymoon in Vegas:  2 stars (reviewed at Disc 17 and then sold)
29. Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat:  1 star (reviewed at Disc 284)
30. Moulin Rouge:  1 star (reviewed at Disc 151)
31. Natural Born Killers:  0 stars (reviewed at Disc 302)

Ratings: 4 stars

Sometimes a soundtrack perfectly captures the feel of the film or show it is meant to accompany. Other times, it is just a great collection of songs. The “True Detective” soundtrack manages to do both.

If you don’t know, “True Detective” is a disturbing crime serial, featuring damaged characters (mostly cops) trying to redeem themselves by stopping criminals even worse. While the first season is superior, both are worth your time and will leave you contemplating the baseness of humanity and the darker secrets of the universe; those secrets that reveal themselves only in fragments, lest they threaten your sanity when encountered whole. Yeah, it’s one of those kinds of shows.

A show like that needs music that sets just the right mood, and famed producer T. Bone Burnett delivers. This soundtrack is actually songs from the first two seasons, shuffled together imperfectly like a deck of cards at a poker table. The shuffling could have taken away from the narrative of the show, but instead the song order creates a new musical narrative that is both evocative of the show, and also casts a spell of its own.

The show manages to find two of the most brooding tracks for each season’s opening credits: the Handsome Family’s “Far From Any Road” (Season 1) and Leonard Cohen’s “Nevermind” (Season 2). The first song is some sort of drug-addled country, with a deep, mysterious vocal and echoes of mariachi bands gone wrong. I don’t know anything else by the Handsome Family, and frankly, this song makes me a bit nervous to delve any deeper. I probably will though.

Cohen’s “Nevermind” has a funky groove and Cohen is at his apocalyptic best as he speaks of all the people who get away with it, whether “it” is love or murder, or some terrible combination of the two.

For all the greatness of these two “title” tracks, the glue that holds this album together is alt-country chanteuse Lera Lynn.

“True Detective” is how I discovered Lera Lynn. Her mournful and lounge-tinged voice sounds like the voice of a ghost here, with T. Bone Burnett turning up the stark echo dial to 11 to maximize the effect of her vocal. Each of her five songs sends a shiver down your spine, leaving you cold and alone with fell thoughts of dark deeds done and the secrets that follow.

Lynn is an accomplished songwriter on her own, and here she teams up with T. Bone and Roseanne Cash. The result is a selection of restless mournful songs that wrap you in loss and regret. On “Lately”, when Lynn sings:

“Lately I'm not feeling like myself

When I look into the glass, I see someone else

I hardly recognize this face I wear

When I stare into her eyes, I see no one there

Lately I'm not feeling like myself”

You can feel the edge of madness creeping in – or is it just grief? The line blurs here as it does throughout the record. Later on “It Only Takes One Shot” she sings of a woman spurned, wrapped in imagery of guns and murder and fell conviction.

As if this record didn’t have enough creepy mood music, we are treated to two longstanding masters: Nick Cave (with Warren Ellis) and Bonnie Prince Billy. Cave and Ellis cover the Gatlin Brothers’ “All the Gold in California” and thoroughly twist it from country anthem to some kind of cultist chant. Bonnie Prince Billy’s “Intentional Injury” is a quiet internalization of the same order.

The record is so good that the Bob Dylan track (“Rocks and Gravel”) is good, but more of an afterthought.

In a way having all these artists contributing their best feels a bit like cheating, and that’s at least one reason I couldn’t give this record a perfect score. It came damn close, though.

Best tracks: All the Lera Lynn tracks (The Only Thing Worth Fighting For, Lately, My Least Favorite Life, A Church in Ruins and It Only Takes One Shot), Nevermind by Leonard Cohen, All the Gold in California by Nick Cave and Warren Ellis, Far From Any Road by The Handsome Family, Intentional Injury by Bonnie Prince Billy.