Tuesday, September 06, 2005

Tennant/Lowe - Battleship Potemkin

What could possibly be better than my favourite band ever (no sarcasm there) doing a soundtrack to the greatest flim ever made EVER (slight saracsm there)? Well a fair bit actually.

First things first though, what other "pop" act would have been asked to undertake such a task? None that I can think of. Battleship Potemkin is one of the silent cinema's most celebrated films and given the boys fondess for playing with Russian imagery (the "from Lake Geneva to the Finland station " line in West End Girls charts Lenin's route back into Russia from exile in April 1917 - SEE, you learn some stuff in these reviews too) it seems as ideal a match as you are likely to get.

The end result is good rather than great, and needless to say it pretty much loses the point of the exercise to listen to the music as a stand-alone piece. There are only two "songs" on the collection as such, the best being No Time For Tears, but where these fall into the overall PSB cannon, i.e. about halfway down the list at best, tells you all you need to know.

This isn't a bad record, and it is an interesting exercise, but it falls someway short of being a great record. Still as something to tide over until the next proper PSB album (due in 2006) it just about does its job.

Icon's View - 3 out of 5.

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