The soundtrack is such an important part of this flick’s overall critical success, it took nearly two years to finish. If you can deal with the movie-band Michael Cera’s Sex Bob-Omb and it’s amateur punk goodness with Beck’s songwriting help, the soundtrack offers several sweet treats. Plumtree puts forth the catchy theme “Scott Pilgrim” and Frank Black (The Pixies) gives us a masterful “I Heard Ramona Sing” which makes it worth getting alone, with it’s smart melodic progression and steady rhythm. The ethereal croon of “By Your Side” by Beachwood Sparks is another winner and “O Katrina!” by The Black Lips is deliciously decadent garage pop.
Scott Pilgrim’s “movie bands” Crash and The Boys (aka Broken Social Scene) and Sex Bob-Omb are brief humorous distractions, and every other track here works great. The T.Rex string heavy opus “Teenage Dream” fits here nicely as well as the Rolling Stones “Under My Thumb.” “It’s Getting Boring By The Sea” is a solid rocker by Blood Red Shoes with tons of energy and Metric’s “Black Sheep” follows it as another potential big hit. The solid ballad “Ramona” penned by Beck (in both acoustic and full orchestral versions) shows he hasn’t fallen off the earth he’s just channeled the band Air. In keeping with movie’s video game effects, it ends with “Threshold (8bit)” a fuzzy electronic game composition. If you’re into the hip and cool, you could do much worse than this. Listen to the whole album streaming.
The Movie Site | Itunes | Amazon