The Avengers: The Soundtrack Album (Various Artists, 1998)

What is it with me collecting soundtracks to terrible movies?! Of course nowadays you say "Avengers" and everybody thinks of the supergrossing mega-blockbuster movie of 2013 that confirmed that superheros will own the multiplex for the next million years. But "Avengers" in 1998 was synonymous with disaster, a $60 million train wreck that ended up grossing $45 million (and frankly, given what I've heard about the film, it was damn lucky to recoup 75% of its costs). I never ever plan on seeing the movie. Also, note this is billed as "The Album", not "The Soundtrack" because...surprise!...pretty much none of these songs actually are in the movie due to some manic last-minute editing that was the killing-blow to an already fatally wounded movie.

So...the soundtrack album. This was another freebie from the heady radio station days of 1998. I loaned this to my cousin a number of years back and he was totally blown away by it. I'm still not sure what triggered this gushing reaction. The first couple of tracks, a pleasant enough merger of electronica and old-school symphonic work (courtesy of Marius de Vries), are good, but the rest of the disc falls into the usual trap of a glorified mix-tape masquerading as a soundtrack. Most of the artists featured appear nowhere else in my music library because the fall outside the scope of what I'm primarily interested in. You've got some big names (Grace Jones, Annie Lennox, Sinead O'Connor) and some electro-indie-rock folks I've never heard of (Merz, Utah Saints, Roni Size, Ashtar Command). Unlike a lot of the stuff I collected from 1998, a number of these artists are still performing, a few of them caught at the very beginning of their careers when the soundtrack came out. And then there post-grunge/Brit-pop/pseudo-ska stuff like The Verve Pipe, Suggs, Dishwalla and Sugar Ray, just because it was the 1990's.

Outside of the opening track, a very cool, lightly electronicized variation on the original Avengers theme, and maybe the Grace Jones track (oddly, a Razzie nominee...I guess I have a tin ear), this soundtrack album doesn't get many plays these days. When I hit 160 GB I'm going to need to give this one some thought.