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As you know, I love soundtracks. Two more I've acquired recently are from the films Vampyros Lesbos and The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou. The former, a fun but somewhat sleazy Spanish exploitation flick directed by Jesus Franco and starring Soledad Miranda, has a surprisingly good funky/jazzy/psychedelic pop score composed by Manfred Hubler and Siegfried Schwab (the latter a quite prolific German film scorer and jazz musician). The Life Aquatic soundtrack is, for the most part, your usual Wes Anderson mixtape of British invasion, folk rock, punk, and new wave (Bowie, Stooges, Baez, Zombies, Devo, etc.) The real reason I got it was to hear the Bowie covers by Brazilian singer-guitarist Seu Jorge--you know, the guy who's constantly noodling on his guitar in the odd corners of Zissou's boat The Belafonte? I quite like Bowie unplugged and in Portuguese. Apparently, Seu Jorge has released a whole album of these covers, but about half are captured here on the soundtrack. The other good reasons for getting the CD are the pieces by Sven Libaek and Devo's Mark Mothersbaugh. Libaek is a Norwegian film composer living in Australia who, according to Anderson's liner notes, wrote the airy jazz pieces which appear on the CD for a real underwater documentary film called Innerspace. Mothersbaugh wrote original pieces for the film using what sounds like a Casio. They are light electronica with catchy melodies; my fave is "Ping Island/Lightning Strike Rescue Op"--it somehow brings me back to a simpler time of Atari video games, terry-cloth shirts, and fondue night.

~CD