If you know Vincent Gallo at all, it's probably from his work in film: he's an actor, and he directed and starred in the minor indie hit Buffalo '66. But Gallo also has a sketchy music career that predates his acting. Check out the bio on his website, where you can laugh at his feeble attempts to 'shock' you with his casual slurs against blacks, Jews, and redheads. ("By the way, did you ever notice the smell of redheads? I think that's why a lot of redhead girls have Black boyfriends. They smell compatible.") In New York City in the '70s, he played clubs like CBGB's in a band with Jean-Michel Basquiat. But that band broke up, and to quote Gallo, "a month later [Basquiat] was a millionaire art star. Sometimes it's good to be Black." Yeah, and having talent doesn't suck, either.
This new release on Warp Records sells Gallo's music on the back of his film career. Recordings of Music for Film includes the soundtracks, written and performed by Gallo, from four of his movies: The Way It Is (1978), If You Feel Froggy, Jump (1979), Downtown '81 (1981), and the only one you'll find at the video store, Buffalo '66 (1998). I don't make a habit of listening to film scores any more than I sit around flipping through set design books or looking at lighting plans. Too often the music can't stand on its own, and it expects us to cut it some slack because we know it's a subordinate work. Gallo's scores are a textbook example: they're made of successfully moody background music that's just awfully tedious on an hour-long disc.
It's been a while since I watched Buffalo '66, yet I still remember the flat, grey shots of that grim city, whose last renaissance died on the slogan "Buffalo Has Wings!" Recordings of Music for Film's only strength is that it achieves the same dreariness, assisted by the lo-fi recording (it sounds like it was mostly mastered from vinyl) which rubs any brightness from the sound. But moodiness can't carry the album. The pieces each sound dully repetitive-- it's as if Gallo found a way to make each instrument sound creepy and just stopped there. The playing meanders-- a loosely strummed guitar, woodblocks clacking, synthesizers sustaining, and the occasional horn, like the whistling tea-kettle sax sound on "Ass Fucker", or the more graceful clarinet on "Her Smell Theme", one of the few pieces with a melody.
The tracks from Buffalo '66 are the most inventive, including the dreamy synth layers of "A Wet Cleaner", and the muffled bump-and-grind "Drowning in Brown" that could have been recorded in an alley behind a nightclub. The singer on "Lonely Boy" sounds mortally creepy, sounding dazed as she wanders through the cracked lyrics: "Daddy, you sure eat a lot of snacks..." This is Gallo's album, so he leaves out the movie's best song-- "Heart of the Sunrise" by Yes-- but at least he cribs from "Roundabout" on "With Smiles & Smiles & Smiles": he copies (but dumbs down) Steve Howe's acoustic intro, and hearing it is like listening to some guy down the hall who practices the song over and over and over again but never gets it right.
And that's the biggest problem with Recordings of Music for Film: it sounds like a home studio project, a whole album of ideas that sound almost-clever but go absolutely fucking nowhere. Nothing's compelling, the performance is, when at its best, average, and although the atmosphere is as thick as muddy slush, that gets old fast. Gallo may have cred in the movie business, but as a recording artist, he's still just "that guy who was in a band with Basquiat."
