One school of thought about film music holds that music is one of the star attractions of the medium-- that cinema is a full sensory experience, and that musical themes can be prominent dramatic elements. Another argues that sound cues shouldn't call attention to themselves, but should unobtrusively underscore the emotional force of the scenes where they're used. Harmony Korine's movie about the friendship between a Michael Jackson and a Marilyn Monroe impersonator would appear to operate on the second principle: its soundtrack is so subdued, and often so soporific, that it threatens to evaporate at every turn.
The "ambient" school of film music can make for great movies, but it doesn't tend to make for rewarding soundtrack albums, and playing the Mister Lonely soundtrack on its own is like seeing decorative borders without a picture inside them. It also might have been fun to hear an actual collaboration between J. Spaceman (aka. Jason Pierce of Spiritualized, who named half a dozen instrumental interludes on that band's new Songs in A&E after Korine) and the Sun City Girls, but alas, they split 17 of these 20 tracks between them. (The other three are just snatches of movie dialogue from Britta Gartner and Werner Herzog, and a brief a cappella piece sung by Rachel Korine.)
The SCGs had clearly been itching to get into movie-score territory for a while-- their Alan Bishop compiled an excellent Ennio Morricone collection, Crime and Dissonance, a few years back. (The band's three previous soundtrack LPs, Juggernaut, Piasa...Devourer of Men, and Dulce, were all for films that don't seem to have actually been released.) Their contributions to the score were apparently recorded in 2006, before Charles Gocher's death last year, and even though they don't work up much forward motion, they've got pleasantly blurry depth (a few tracks involve what sound like Tibetan singing bowls) and a touch of creeping dread. "Circus Theme" is a slithering, scaly belcher of an oom-pah-pah organ solo, and "Steppe Spiritual" finds them revisiting their Torch of the Mystics-style singing-in-tongues. "Mr. Lonely Viola" is a cover of the sappy Bobby Vinton hit from 1964 that gave Korine's movie its name; with its melody carried by guest Eyvind Kang's viola, it's one of the tenderest things ever recorded by a band that almost never exposed its tender side.
Spaceman's contributions, on the other hand, are singularly tedious-- without the conceptual grandeur of Spiritualized, all he can do is plod and doodle, and his sleepy little blues and arpeggios seem like half-considered sketches for the arrangements on Songs in A&E. ("Garden Walk" is an orchestration in search of a theme.) Then there are his "experimental" tracks: if "Stooges Harmonica", 47 seconds of Pierce huffing and puffing at a harp, were to vanish from the earth, its absence would probably not cause a ripple, and the same goes for "Panama 1", which appears to be a combination of aleatoric fuzz-guitar feedback and somebody trying out a set of panpipes for the first time. Maybe this stuff has some sort of meaning or power in the context of Korine's movie; it sure doesn't on its own.
