I picked up the
Kill Bill vol. 1 soundtrack CD today. Like film soundtrack CDs (well, the better ones, anyway), it's a bit of a mixed bag, though has enough good moments to make it worthwhile. Nancy Sinatra's
Bang Bang (My Baby Shot Me Down) is, of course, beautiful and haunting, and Bernard Herrmann's
Twisted Nerve is a very stylish piece of retro ambience. Luis Bacalov's
The Grand Duel (Parte Prima), taken from the score of some old film, is spaghetti-Western music in the Morricone tradition, and I'm sure I have heard Zamfir's
The Lonely Shepherd before. I wasn't too fond of RZA's contributions, particularly
Ode to Oren Ishii, a rather gratuitous piece of gangsta rap. (I suppose it makes marketing sense to have it there, though, and it probably beats having LL Cool J rapping about whatever cardboard-cutout character he played in his latest film.) The CD is padded out with loops of drumming and sound effects created by RZA for combat sequences; listening to them is not unlike listening to an electronic-music magazine CD of free samples.
One annoyance: they only put a bit over a minute of Neu!'s Super 16 on the CD. Given that the disc clocks in at 59 minutes, they could have fit the whole track on it. Though perhaps it'd have cost them higher licensing fees or something.
Whoa. I didn't even hear out "Super 16" in the movie. Mebbe because I just assumed that it was a ripoff of the original, sort of like how you can't tell when a certain type of breakbeat is actually lifted from "The Levee Breaks" or just an after-market pastiche. Heh.
At least the associates of the Wu are a couple of degrees less painful than Punkadiddle or whatever Sean Coombs is calling himself these days.