It is difficult to judge a soundtrack when listening to it in isolation from the movie it is meant to accompany. This album, roughly half and half the work of Jason Pierce (under his J. Spaceman pseudonym) and the Sun City Girls, is enjoyable by its own merits but unfortunately has moments where the music sounds incomplete, the necessary images absent.
Pierce's contributions are mostly a far cry from his style of song writing in Spiritualized (and millions of light years away from Spacemen 3). Instead of the lush and powerful arrangements of his main breadwinning enterprise, the pieces here range from simple musical sketches, usually brief but enjoyable, to strange mood setters, like "Stooges Harmonica," that do not have enough oomph in them to stand on their own without the movie to go with them. Occasionally the melodic style that characterises Pierce's work in Spiritualized appears in unusual contexts such as the pastoral strings of "Garden Walk." However, the psychedelic overload that draws me to Pierce's music is absent. It is not a bad thing by any means; it shows another side to an already impressive artist.
Pierce is not the only one breaking away from his usual modus operandi; the Sun City Girls' pieces are quite different from what I normally encounter from them (but granted I'm not a massive collector of their work). The gentle, hushed air of "3D Girls" sits in between some of Pierce's best and least impressive pieces; here the Sun City Girls sound like they might overpower whatever scene is on the screen at that time. The highlight of the album comes with their rendition of the song "Lonely," the viola-led arrangement is a bittersweet take on the often schmaltzy classic. The album's closer, "Farewell," is another beautiful piece that not only works as music for the end of a film but also as a poignant goodbye to Charles Gocher.
The soundtrack to Mister Lonely is not an essential purchase for devotees of either Pierce or the Sun City Girls although it is unlikely that anyone would be totally disappointed with it. I could do without the chunks of dialogue dotted throughout the disc (even if one of them is recited by Werner Herzog). Aside from these, which in fairness only add up to a small fraction of the total run time, and the odd dull track, this is a bit of an oddity but it is at the least an enjoyable oddity.
samples:
- J. Spaceman, "Garden Walk"
- Sun City Girls, "Mr Lonely Viola"
- Sun City Girls, "Farewell"
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