Songs and soundscapes cohesive enough
to warrant legitimate album status.
You could count the number of soundtracks that stand up as great bona fide rock’n’roll albums on the fingers of one toe – let’s face it – the soundtrack is there to enhance visuals, not to be an entity in its own terms. Separation City, Tom Scott’s bittersweet reality comedy about breaking up in the windy city, is a case in point with The Phoenix Foundation’s Sam Scott and Luke Buda being employed by director Paul Middleditch to provide the emotional backdrop for the movie amongst other appropriate Kiwi band inclusions. So, for half of the album, Scott and Buda provide the mainly delicate keyboard/guitar downbeat mood pieces (Nipples, Katrien), peaking with the delightful ambivalence of Happy in the Trees. Elsewhere, The Black Seeds’ subdued reggae skank Come to Me, Cassette’s lonesome pedal steel guitar on Say Goodbye and the NZSO’s rendition of Vaughan Williams’s doleful Fantasia on a Theme
of Thomas Tallis sustain a melancholy
that provides the album with a unity that avoids the usual fragmented soundtrack album malaise.