Various Artists - Until The End Of The World (Original Motion Picture Soundtrack)

I was saddened to learn of the death in Pittsfield, Massachusetts last week of singer and actress Julee Cruise. About four years ago, she announced that she was suffering from systemic lupus, a painful autoimmune condition that left her depressed and unable to move and walk. Reports state that she took her own life at her home, with The B-52's song "Roam" playing as she died (Cruise was a touring member of The B-52's in the early 1990s, replacing Cindy Wilson who took a few years off to raise her children; I remember seeing her on stage at a band show I attended in Washington, DC during that period).

In a post I wrote almost a dozen years ago, I detailed how I first came across Cruise's music and my impressions regarding it - the melancholy, haunting quality that both repels and attracts the listener. After the release of her debut album Floating Into The Night in 1989, Cruise issued a follow-up, The Voice Of Love, four years later. As with the first album, almost all of the songs on her sophomore release were written by director David Lynch and composer Angelo Badalamenti, so the sound and atmosphere are remarkably similar to Floating Into The Night. The Voice Of Love is more of a continuation of her debut, rather than a stand-alone entity. If you liked the first, than this one will be right up your alley as well.

Between these two albums, Cruise recorded a Lynch/Badalamenti-modified cover of an old Elvis Presley song, "Summer Kisses, Winter Tears", for the soundtrack to Wim Wenders' scifi drama Until The End Of The World, starring William Hurt. The plot of the film had something to do with in a finding and using a device that can record visual experiences and visualize dreams... but the end result was so confusing and convoluted that the few people who DID go to see the movie were left flummoxed by it. Cashing in on his success with small, cerebral films like Paris, Texas and Wings Of Desire, Wenders managed to secure a budget of $22 million for this latest film, an amount more than the cost of all of his previous films combined. And he proceeded to spend every penny of that money, spreading his production over almost half a year with setups in 11 countries.

While Graeme Revell (co-founder of the Australian industrial band SPK) was commissioned to compose the movie theme and other incidental music for the film, Wenders asked a number of his favorite recording artists (including Cruise) to contribute songs as well for inclusion. For their selections, he asked them to anticipate the kind of music they would be making a decade later, when the film was set. It was Wenders' desire to use every song he received to its fullest extent that ultimately contributed to the overall length of the film. The initial cut was reportedly TWENTY HOURS long, from which the director and producer whittled down to a more standard running time versions of 2 1/2 and 3 hours (which Wenders called the "Reader's Digest" versions). There is also reportedly a five-hour "director's" cut of this film which has been screened at various festivals over the years.

...Not that any of that mattered. The truncated versions of Until The End Of The World were released to theaters, first in Germany in September 1991, and later in the U.S. that December, and overall the flick was a commercial failure, managing to gross only about $830,000 against its $22 million budget.  Critics at the time savaged it; Roger Ebert gave the film 2 stars out of 4, describing it as lacking the "narrative urgency" required to sustain interest in the story, and wrote that it "plays like a film that was photographed before it was written, and edited before it was completed". He went on to say that a documentary about the globe-trekking production would likely have been more interesting than the film itself.  Other reviewers were even less kind.

But while the film flopped, the soundtrack was, frankly, amazing, featuring great songs by some of the top alternative performers of the day.  Wenders chose well.  Here's the soundtrack lineup:

1. "Opening Title" – Graeme Revell
2. "Sax and Violins" – Talking Heads
3. "Summer Kisses, Winter Tears" – Julee Cruise
4. "Move with Me (Dub)" – Neneh Cherry
5. "The Adversary" – Crime & the City Solution
6. "What's Good" – Lou Reed
7. "Last Night Sleep" – Can
8. "Fretless" – R.E.M.
9. "Days" – Elvis Costello
10. "Claire's Theme" – Graeme Revell
11. "(I'll Love You) Till the End of the World" – Nick Cave & The Bad Seeds
12. "It Takes Time" – Patti Smith (with Fred Smith)
13. "Death's Door" – Depeche Mode
14. "Love Theme" – Graeme Revell
15. "Calling All Angels" (Remix Version) – Jane Siberry with k.d. lang
16. "Humans from Earth" – T Bone Burnett
17. "Sleeping in the Devil's Bed" – Daniel Lanois
18. "Until the End of the World" – U2
19. "Finale" – Graeme Revell

Personal favorites on this disc, in additon to the Julee Cruise song, include R.E.M.'s "Fretless", Depeche Mode's "Death's Door" and the Jane Siberry/k.d.lang collaboration "Calling All Angels".  At the time, most of these songs were unavailable anywhere else, making the compilation a gold mine of rarities. All in all, the soundtrack did better than the movie, eventually reaching #114 on the U.S. Billboard Top 200 Albums chart in 1992.

So, in honor of the life and art of Julee Cruise, I proudly offer to you all Until The End Of The World (Original Motion Picture Soundtrack), released on Warner Brothers Records on December 10th, 1991.  Enjoy, and as always... well, you know.

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Robyn Hitchcock & The Egyptians - 'So You Think You're In Love' EP

[Sorry that I've been kind of slow in posting stuff this month - it's been pretty busy here, which has sort of limited my time to put together the erudite, pithy writeups on this music that I know you all love so well (ha ha!) . . . I'm trying to make an end-of-month push here, and get a few more posted to at least meet my monthly average of 10-12 albums/EPs (you might have noticed that the number of posts has increased in the last week - or then again, maybe you haven't . . .). So on that note, here's another one:]

I should probably be a bigger fan of the music of Robyn Hitchcock than I am, but I simply have trouble fully getting into his music. He's just too quirky and inconsistent for me. I was never a fan of The Soft Boys, his first post-punk/psychedelic-punk group, so I have no nostalgia for his early work. And it seems that every time he puts out something that catches my interest, he follows up with something that I can't stand, putting me back to Square One with him once again.

For example, I loved the song "Balloon Man" (off of the great Globe Of Frogs album) when it came out in 1988, and figured the guy had finally found a sound that appealed to me. But his follow-up, 1989's Queen Elvis, was terrible, and I found the lead single off of that album, "Madonna Of The Wasps", to be weak and somewhat whiny. Once again, he lost what little goodwill he had with me.

With that being said, I paid little attention to his next release, 1990's acoustic solo outing Eye, and by the time he reunited with The Egyptians for his 1991 album on A&M Records, Perspex Island, I was all but completely ignoring his output. However, that perspective changed once I began hearing cuts from the new disc on the radio. I was living in the Washington, DC area at the time, and WHFS there put the lead single, "So You Think You're In Love", in heavy rotation. I thought to myself, "Pretty good song."

But it was another Robyn Hitchcock single from that time period played on 'HFS that really caught my attention and interest. They played it less frequently on the station, which was too bad, as it was a MUCH stronger song than "So You Think You're In Love". It was a gentle acoustic duet between Hitchcock and Michael Stipe of R.E.M., called "Dark Green Energy" (Stipe and other members of R.E.M. collaborated on other songs on Perspex Island).

 The song was just outstanding, so much so that I decided to become a Robyn Hitchcock fan once again, and went running full-bore to Tower Records to pick up the disc. But when I got to the record store, I found that the song I loved so much wasn't on the album track list.

I had to hunt around for a while to actually find the recorded tune; I finally tracked it down on an EP, So You Think You're In Love, offered at a small record store I used to go to in Chevy Chase, Maryland. Although the EP featured the title cut, the song that A&M was pushing to be the 'hit' off of this album, the EP was woefully obscure and hard to find, which made absolutely no sense to me at all - it stands to reason that if you want to sell something, it helps to have it readily available in large quantities.

And, of course, after drawing me back into the fold, Hitchcock drove me away again with his next release, Respect, which was his last with The Egyptians. Respect sucked so bad that even Hitchcock himself has been quoted as saying he himself didn't like the record. And there you go.

For me, Robyn Hitchcock hasn't put out anything as good as this EP in the last 20 years. He's still plugging away at it, though - God bless him, and I wish him all the luck and success in the world.

Here you are - enjoy, and let me know what you think:

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