Spawn Soundtrack

CD Cover Various Heavy and Electronic Artists
Sony

Review by Darren Gawle



45-second excert from "No Remorse (I Wanna Die)" (various formats)


The team that brought you the Judgment Night soundtrack is back. You remember that one don't you, the one with the indie band/hip-hop group teamups? Oh, don't tell me your attention span is that short. No, wait, maybe it's just an indication of how iffy the idea was to begin with.

So what's up this time? Metal meets electronic music (i.e. techno, jungle, etc...), and, at least for the duration of the Slayer/Atari Teenage Riot collaboration, "No Remorse (I Wanna Die)," everything makes perfect sense, with two boys from Germany taking Slayer to Baskin & Robbins for thirteen flavours of hell (ah, laboured metaphors -- are there any other kind?).

The Soul Coughing/Roni Size and Butthole Surfers/Moby tracks are pretty good, as well, but the problem here, as with Judgment Night, is that one act invariably overpowers the other on most of the songs. On "Long Hard Road Out of Hell," the Sneaker Pimps provide a few bars of verse until -- BOMBS AWAY!!! -- Marilyn Manson and his army of the undead blow away any subtlety with a chorus that runs "I wanna live, I wanna love/But it's a long hard road out of hell." Gee, Marilyn, I thought you hated love and loved hell; I guess now you're a hypocrite as well as a talentless tosser.

Er, where was I? Oh yeah, Orbital ends up merely supplying the rhythm section to a Kirk Hammett guitar solo and, on "Can't You Trip Like I Do," Filter and the Crystal Method decide to divide the song -- quite literally -- down the middle. The only really bad song on the disc is the Incubus/D.J. Greyboy work, "Familiar," which only serves as an example of what D.J. Shadow meant by "Why Hip-hop Sucks in 1996."

Is Spawn worth buying? Yes, if only for the Slayer/Atari Teenage Riot track. But maybe you'd best wait for it to appear at your local CD exchange, which it will in spades by next year.




First published in Drop-D Magazine on August 22, 1997

Index | Search | E-mail | Info | Copyright

 
Considering copying some of the images from this story?
Please read this first. Thanks.