Let The Crow Take Musical Flight Again...

The Crow the movie was a sizable hit when it came out in 1994, but the accompanying soundtrack was bigger. It was freakin' huge, becoming a megaseller (we're talking triple platinum in the U.S. alone, baby), soundtracking the teenage years of many a youngling worldwide - yours truly included - and subsequently also became a staple of second hand record stores, besides about twelve copies of R.E.M.'s Monster and the inevitable half dozen copies of Hootie And The Blowfish's Cracked Rear View. The 90s were obviously still the heyday of the soundtrack compilation as secret-or-aspiring-hits-collection, with tracks you couldn't necessarily get elsewhere - the producers of the The Crow album made sure all tracks were exclusives - but the immense success was still somewhat surprising considering how hard-edged the record and how niche the film as a goth/film noir/comic book adaptation was. Suffice to say that at the time it was probably the hardest record I had in my collection.

Sure, having a couple of big names on the album didn't hurt, with Nine Inch Nails being the key addition to the soundtrack that started to drop all other dominos. Once Tent Reznor in, record company signed off on the concept of the album, and the research for similarly themed or similar-sounding bands and artists began. James O'Barr had gone so far as to quote an entire song by The Cure in the comic book source (and cheekily written 'used with permission' despite asking nothing of nobody), but when Robert Smith was approached, he loved the comic and the script and for the first time produced a song specific for a film. (A year later, he'd write "Dredd Song" for the Sly Stallone-starring Judge Dredd, a much less well-regarded film and soundtrack). And while the Crow soundtrack was rife with big names, there could have been even more Radiohead's then-underappreciated-but-now-a-modern classic "Creep" could have been on the album, but executive producer Jeff Most kicked it off after Brandon Lee's death, not wanting his character to be called a creep or a weirdo. Smashing Pumpkin's "Silverfuck" was written with the film in mind, but the record company asked for the song back to put on Siamese Dream. 

As an older teen I loved the movie. I didn't listen to the music that was just developing and woud later be known as emo, but you can think of teen OBG as a sort-of-emo kid, with younger me lapping up the the film's themes of love that trancends death, revenge and quests for higher purpose. And looking back on the movie, it still holds up today, even if its characters and script are relatively light and barely scratch more than the surface. That said, the actors do an excellent job to bring these thinly drawn characters to life, none moreso than Brandon Lee in the title role, whose on set death always overshadowed the film and its themes, making it even more 'goth' and darkly romantic than it was. But really, in most ways, The Crow is all about the look and feel. The sets and design work is absolutely incredible, as is the lighting and the camerawork. This film looks like no other, and today's flat, green-screened 'we'll fix it in post' practices will assure that we will never have a film like it again. The miniature work is also something that for obvious reasons we won't see again, and what a loss that is as well, with the Gothic cityscapes reminding you of Tim Burton's Gotham City. Proyas' Detroit in this film of course looks nothing like the real city, but a godforsaken urban wasteland of shadows, broken down neighbourhoods and rain. So. Much. Rain. But hey, it can't rain all the time. 

Loving the movie meant at least respecting the soundtrack, even though I was very picky, which will come into play in how I approached the One Buck Record of the day. I loved the film's signature songs, while some of the more noisy industrial tracks weren't my bag and some I didn't remember at all, for reasons we'll get into in a bit. Let's just say that listening to the album always involved free and freqent use of the 'skip' button, something that was at least partly responsible for the creation of this specific album. The other reason was that, when I finally picked up the CD with Graeme Revell's score music, I realized how little the soundtrack alone represented the feeling of the movie it accompanies. 

I already mentioned this in the first reworked soundtrack that mixed soundtrack songs and score tracks, but it is even more true here: To simulate how a movie sounded and felt, you have to have the two together (unless there is little to no score or it's entirely unobtrusive and thus, uh, unmemorable). The Crow is mainly known for its soundtrack album - one of the biggest-selling soundtracks of its, or any era - but what most people remember from the movie, not the album, is something different: How Graeme Revell's score with its World Music vocalizing and heavy rock guitars supported and supplemented the rock tracks by some of the biggest name in the game in the 90s. 

Starting this project, I was wondering again about something that always felt curious, and a bit 'off'' about a film I know well and have watched numerous times. How come that I remembered some songs extremely well, while I had literally no memory of ever hearing a couple of them in the film at all? The first part of that equation is simple: The most memorable songs are memorable, because the film makes them so: You always remember The Cure's "Burn" - the inofficial theme song from the film - and Nine Inch Nails' cover of Joy Division's "Dead Souls" because the movie constructed whole sequences  that almost function as music videos around them. As such, these songs, much like Jane Siberry's end title ballad "It Can't Rain All The Time, co-written with Revell around one of his themes, are inextricable from the pictures and the moments shown. In the case of The Crow it's all about the score and some handpicked 'feature' songs.

But what about those other songs that even as a fan of the film you'd have difficulties to place? Rewatching the film to find why I had no memory of how the film used, say, Rage Against The Machine's "Darkness" or Helmet's "Milktoast". And that is because the film didn't use them, not really. These tracks, like the ones by The Rollins Band and Pantera are used as incidental music coming from the night club while Top Dollar and his minions are scheming evil plans upstairs, meaning they are almost completely inaudible other than as low backgrpund noise. So, yeah, the soundtrack album cheats to put some big names on the album, even if director Alex Proyas couldn't find a showcase spot, or any real spot, for them in the film. Thus follows my brutal logic for this album: These four tracks that are all but inaudible in the film are gone, big names attached or not. 

The usual idea applies for The Crow [OBG Edit]: Mix and match score moments and songs in chronological order to imitate the movie's movement and capture it's biggest moments. I slightly cheated, for personal reasons. See, "Big Empty" is by far my favorite track from Stone Temple Pilots - a grunge second coming track that perfects the quiet-loud-quiet dynamic so many of its predecessors were built around - and I didn't want to wait all the way to the end of the album to hear it, as you would have to, as that song ran over the second half of the movie's end credits. And it's a small cheat: You see, during the films opening, when T-Bird's jolly bunch of criminals and murderer's drive by the hot dog stand, where friendly beat cop Albrecht and young Sarah hang out, "Big Empty" is playing in their car as they speed by. You can only hear a couple of bars of the song, but it's there. Enough for ol' OBG to showcase it, albeit shortened a bit, in the lead-off track. It is also, in its unedited form, the last track of the album, so if two "Big Empty"'s is too much for you, you can easily drop the 'reprise' version at the very end. A ton of tracks have gotten new names, with the featured songs added in parantheses.

Generally I shortened down the songs rather unmercifully, to keep momentum up, and the album moving along. Having one of the lesser songs run unabridged for four or five minutes could and would really be a momentum killer, so most tracks are edited, some down to their main gist. Machines Of Loving Grace's punchy "Golgotha Tenement Blues" is cut in half, but plays pretty much exactly as in the movie: At the time I end it, it gets mixed into the background as the characters start to speak. The big moments of this track are here, and I didn't need anything else. My Life With The Thrill Kill Cult maybe knew someone in high places, because like Medicine they got a plum gig as one of the house bands in Top Dollar's night club. So "After The Flesh", which I personally find to be an awful industrial noise rock number, gets played almost in its entirety - I kept only the 30-second intro before the song really gets garish. On the other hand, Violent Femmes' "Color Me Once" plays for about thirty seconds as background music in the film, but gets a longer - if not complete - spot in the set list. 

The secret to why Graeme Revell's score is so remarkable is that it really is a couple of different scores in one. The city scapes get a lot of World Music influences, ethnic vocalizing and industrial percussion, elements that Revell noted got copied for a lot of gothic, religious or horror/thriller scores. The romantic and 'beyond the grave' scenes get the usual angelic voice choir and the action-based scenes and scenes featuring the main character, a rock musician, get heavy guitar-featuring tracks. It also helps that Revell has a background in industrial and rock music, coming from Aussie industrial electronic rocker SPK. There is even a bit of one of my favorite film scores of all time in this score: The canned blues horns in "Nothing Is Trivial" recall Vangelis' "Blade Runner Blues", which I don't think is purely coincidental, from one nocturnal tale in a city in which it always rains to another. 

Wow, that write-up got a little out of hand here. Time to, uh, let the music do the talking. Music From The Crow (A One Buck Records Mix) is exactly what it says it is, and if you have seen that film a long while ago will hopefully succeed in bringing back fond memories. Or, if you haven't, maybe gets you in the mood to check this out. Excellent movie, excellent music. One's already easily at hand, check for the other. Or not, but enjoy the aural odyssey of Eric Draven on his quest for revenge and redemption.