Music To 1UP To
You know how some soundtrack albums leave important tracks off, or music for an important scene, or they don't have the short little musical number that only lasts for 45 seconds, but you love it anyways, or the music you'd never think to put on a soundtrack? Yeah, well Scott Pilgrim doesn't have that problem. At all. At some 37 tracks and over an hour, if there's a piece of music in the film Scott Pilgrim, or even a piece of dialogue that goes with a piece of music, or anything of the sort, it's on one of their soundtracks.
Everything from the Bass Battle, to Patel's weird musical number, to the 8-Bit Universal Theme heard at the beginning of the movie, to the various pieces of score found throughout the movie. If they left anything out of these soundtracks, I'd be very surprised. As a result, with this wide-ranging selection of music, mostly composed by Radiohead's Nigel Godrich, Scott Pilgrim will certainly be the most original score you hear all year. It'll also be the one that sounds like it could pass for some electronic music album. This mostly comes from the fact that good portions of the album sound like a Chill album with portions of dialogue from the movie mixed in for good measure. You never know exactly what you're going to get from track to track. One minute you could be lulled into some romantic sleep, and the next you could feel like you're in the middle of some drugged-out video game.
Overall, the unexpectedness of it all is all part of the charm of the album. It won't any awards, but it will give you a break from the usual scores you're used to hearing. I wouldn't call it great exactly. It's just different in a very positive manner.
4/5 Stars
