<img align=left src="http://images-eu.amazon.com/images/P/B00009NJ8V.02.LZZZZZZZ.jpg"></img>I've now heard <a href="http://www.amazon.co.uk/exec/obidos/ASIN/B00009NJ8V/ref=sr_aps_music_1_1/202-9872136-5295035">the new Pastels album, "The Last Great Wilderness"</a>. It's the soundtrack to the film of the same name. One of those indie films that no one not personally known to the director has actually seen. The album is ten tracks long, and checks in at 25 mins. One of them features Jarvis Cocker on vocals. Another is a cover version of Sly and the Family Stone's "Everybody Is a Star".
My thoughts turn to comparisons with the Stina Nordenstam soundtrack to "Aberdeen" – one or two actual songs, the rest are brief instrumental sound cues rather than proper tracks. With these indie soundtracks to indie films, I never understand why, if the tracks are going to come out in the shops, the artist doesn't expand the cues to proper tracks or even songs. No one really sits and listens to 45 sec snippets by themselves: just when you start to get into it, it's over. And like the Aberdeen soundtrack, the film in question seems to be more obscure than the album.
With proper commercial soundtrack albums, eg Moulin Rouge, the album and film promote each other, but ultimately the soundtrack album defers to the film. If the film in question runs for 2 days at the ICA then vanishes, I really think the soundtrack artist should rename the album as a original release for the artist in their own right, and build the cues into proper length tracks. Otherwise, it's all a bit half-hearted and comes across as deliberately non-essential. But in a saturated marketplace, ALL ALBUMS RELEASED MUST BE CONSIDERED BY THEIR CREATORS AS ESSENTIAL!!!! Why release a NON-ESSENTIAL album at all? Why release an album, or indeed write a song, if you don't honestly think it's the best one you've done yet? That's should be the law. If the Pastels DO think this, I think they should go back and make the tracks on "The Last Great Wilderness" long enough to give the music it's due… Life's too short for releasing deliberately wilful ephemera, surely. Not if your average workrate is like The Pastels, ie two proper albums a decade. The first Pastels single came out a year before the first Smiths one.
See also that Stephen Merritt soundtrack album – how often do the Magnetic Fields fans listen to that, compared to "69 Love Songs"? And have you seen the film? Has anyone??? What is the point? Bid's Scarlet's Well albums are deliberate soundtracks to imaginary musical films. With the Pastels album, and the Merritt one too, the film might as well be imaginary.
Still, the actual music is great, even if it's all too short. The post-Katrina Pastels have always been good at instrumentals – "Kitted Out" on "Truckload Of Trouble" is a glorious piece of cabaret burlesque. And I love The Sly Stone cover – the only actual proper Pastels song on this new album. The Jarvis song is nice – though a bit Jarvis by numbers, and even that ends a bit prematurely.
I may well buy the CD, because it's got a nice cover by Aggi and is inexpensive. But we'll have to see how much I actually re-listen to it, though. Shouldn't all albums be made to be re-listened to?
Is Stephen Pastel the Philip Larkin of indie music? Much revered and influential, a qualified librarian on the side, his voice unmistakably low and doleful, his work more and more sporadic, and when it does appear it's extremely, frustratingly short.
