Review Summary: Let's fucking live, aye?
Let’s talk movies. Specifically, movies about music. Specifically, music against conventional thinking. Specifically, the music to those movies about music about resisting conventional thinking.
Frank is a lampoonery of the highest level, mimicking reality and laughing in its face. A whizzy film like that deserves an appropriately murky, yet soulful soundtrack. And the fuzzed out life-celebrating silliness of Stephen Rennicks’ musical creation fits like a warm *** to a pissed upon toilet. In between the lovely interludes playing through as the interluding scenes are playing out in a film focusing on a band just playing by.
So let’s side away all the childishly sweet “Welcome to Vetno” or “Work Begins in Earnest”, which are the songs made only to accompany their appropriate scenes, and let’s just dive straight into the head-scratchery of Frank’s musical crabbedness. From the opener “Jon’s Crap Songs” you’ll be invited to learn a slight tad of Jon the character, whom you’ll meet repeatedly throughout the album on similar a capella frigidness like “Jon Shares His Songs” or on the stylistically enriched by Frankbender’s presence itself “Jon’s Songs Changed by Frank and Clara”, assuming you don’t have the film and all of its tell-talery itself with at any time to clear out the thematic confusion these out-of-context tiny little ballads probably threw you in, also assuming you didn’t notice the big glowing ‘Soundtrack’ inscription above.
Outside of those types of anti-music, if I may so call them, there is an assemblage of uniquely, distinctly, memorably off-colour, oddments of tracks that build together the film’s psychotropic plot. Ridiculous, mindless oddities like “Secure the Galactic Perimeter”, the softness of “Lighthouse Keeper”, the striking catchiness of “Ginger Crouton” or the adventurous wilderness of “Creaky Door”.
You will find a ***ful of rivetingly shrill production (or the lack thereof), the indescribable cohesion in flow (or the lack thereof), the vividly bewildering style of the lyrics (or the lack thereof); all of this is to be found on here. It’s a miraculously magnetic and charming, yet oddly off-putting, release that is the perfect accompaniment to just as obscurely saddening and mind-twisting film.
