Various Artists

Underworld Soundtrack

Lakeshore

By Timothy Gabriele

Collegian Correspondent

Sometime shortly after April 20, 1999, being goth became not only grounds for social ostracization, but suspension from high school. Trenchcoats were indicative of involvement in dangerous mafias. KMFDM quotes in your profile were secretly placed in FBI files around the globe.

All ambiguous poetry censored, trenchcoats were locked away and part of the culture’s innocence was gone. Most of the excommunicated goths turned to a place even darker than the brutal confines of the industrial revolution – techno.

Some people, like Danny Lohner, the live guitarist for Nine Inch Nails and mastermind behind the historically underpromoted “Underworld Soundtrack,” never left their trail of tears too far in the past. As producer and composer of several of the film’s incidental pieces, Lohner hammered together a motley lot of celebrity friends to produce what could have been a cutting edge lineup – in 1996. This whole project, despite appearances by contemporary talent like the Dillinger Escape Plan and the Icarus Line, smells like a love letter to people whose major purchases in the past five years have been any Maynard James Keenan project and the last appropriate NIN release in 1999.

The movie itself is being promoted as combining equal elements of The Matrix, The Crow and Blade for two hours of nauseating music video editing and an unsurprising amount of style over substance. Each of those three films had their respective soundtracks scrambled together from the hip music of the day and the Underworld soundtrack is no different.

It’s a surprisingly low-key affair though. Sure, there’s a good deal of energetic material here, but the latter half especially sinks into the more ethereal piano-led gothic territory. It’s hard to imagine a pre-certified blockbuster like Underworld eliciting so many somber moments (especially without falling into a pit of Keanu-style awkwardness). Still, big names and relative unknowns alike till the grave, as one of the two A Perfect Circle remixes exclaims, of 4AD artists like Dead Can Dance and This Mortal Coil.

Speaking of graves, Helmet’s Page Hamilton, a Crow soundtrack alumni, reappears after years of inactivity with a solo effort called “Throwing Punches.” It’s unfortunate that these petty jabs don’t compare at all to the better works of Helmet. Hamilton’s a dinosaur here, croaking through dirty 5:4 and elsewise-odd tempo hits of guitar. This proves he has not followed much music since Helmet’s terrible 1997 album “Aftertaste” almost completely overturned the band’s solid reputation. In fact, this song belongs back on that album, vying for space alongside the other nu metal throwaways. Hamilton’s forced staccato sounds are nothing more than a pale imitation of his former self. His new band gluts out such a predictable footnote that it kind of sounds like a Midwestern garage band who downloaded a Helmet mp3 and then immediately decided to steal some ideas for their new P.O.D cover band.

Then there are the collaborations. The album starts with a spanking-new track by The Damning Well, another name for the so-called synergy of Filter’s Richard Patrick and Wes Borland, formerly of Limp Bizkit. Has-beens? Not necessarily so.

It’s got all the trappings of what churned the stomachs of hardcore industrial fans when the genre went pop in the mid ’90s, though; that sweltering and melodramatic chorus, the melodic riff-based guitars that rock you and the clever studio effects. It’s not a bad track for this specific class of music. It’s just unfortunate for all those involved that this particular class of music exhausted all its redundant ideas shortly after its inception into mainstream culture.

Track two features the first of the four Maynard James Keenan songs featured on this album. Tool fans will find this reason enough to purchase the album without thinking twice. Puscifier, Keenan’s pet project with Lohner, will not disappoint. It’s a sweet little slice of burlesque about a sexy little devil that’s got an element of folkish storytelling that has been absent in any Keenan project to date. He proves himself to be up to the task though, rollicking along simultaneously tempting and warning you that “she’ll suck you dry.”

Next, Keenan joins the Red Hot Chilli Peppers’ John Frusciante in helping out David Bowie for a slow ballad called “Bring me the Disco King.” On the surface, the track sounds like a dream come true. Of course, it falls below expectations, like collaborations of this caliber usually do. It’s quite a lovely song actually, executed with reservation by the three superstars. The ageless Bowie swoons a mournful tune while Frusciante plucks lightly above the obligatory string section. The wood instruments avoid Spector-like bombast and instead provide a raft for the song to float along. It is actually Keenan, relegated to whispers in the background, that nearly ruins the song in a slightly pompous reprisal of the call and response method utilized by Richard Patrick and he on the Damning Well track. Luckily, Bowie saves the day.

Lohner’s instrumental music as Renholder shows that while he may have a few ideas up his sleeve, most of them are on loan from his buddy Trent. “Down in the Lab” is essentially the coil remix of NIN’s “Closer” (as featured over the opening credits of David Fincher’s “Se7en”) and the link between “Now I Know” and NIN’s “Pilgrimage” is only a hop, skip and a jump away.

The Underworld soundtrack also contains the long-awaited return of industrial’s godfathers, the PETA-worshipping, Kubrick-sampling, stilt-wearing band of power electronic assassins that could only have come out of the snowy terrain of Canada. Of course, I’m talking about Skinny Puppy. In the vein of frontman Nivek Ogre’s recent dancey electro unit Ohgr, “Optimissed” is easily the most accessible thing that Skinny Puppy has done. Oddly reunited a good eight years after programmer Dwayne Goettel’s sudden death, Skinny Puppy combine a seemingly nonsensical cut-up pattern of syllables together at a rapid-fire pace. It doesn’t take a Quaalude popping Chicago Wax Trax veteran to realize that these old dawgs are still ahead of their game.

There are some decent bits of new material by younger talent that overcome the soundtrack’s stuck-in-1995 feel. The Dillinger Escape Plan, the most progressive band in hardcore, churns out a bipolar piece of noise candy that hurls from anguished scowls to lush passages of actual singing. The ensemble obviously picked up some tips from Irony is A Dead Scene’s guest vocalist Mike Patton. Songs by Finch and The Icarus Line also provide nice melodic diversions of pure timeless melodic fuzz rock. Not exactly five star material, but welcome polarity shifts with no excess eery synth to boot.

The piano-based tracks by Sarah Bettens, Lisa Germano, Johnette Napolitano, Milla (Jovavich, the redhead from The Fifth Element) and even Trust Company are pretty good, sometimes though, they are tedious pieces of melancholy and gloom. However, they all act as different parts of the same blue path of heartbreak and self-pity.

Milla Jovovich’s humble attempts to mime Elysian Fields’ Jennifer Charles are cute. In all honesty, Trust Company should go back to the headbanger’s ball where they belong. There’s just only so much that a sun drenched 21-year-old boy with no foreseeable romantic calamity can endure.

This is virtually how the entire album feels in general. That black nail polish is empty, those Poppy Z. Brite books are dusty, and that Marilyn Manson lunchbox is long lost. Why won’t they let dead goths rest in peace?