Frank Kogan

Haven't seen Bandslam; am sure there can be a touching movie about teens who care deeply about shitty music. And sometimes when you see bad songs in use - movies can do this - you discover that they're not bad. Sometimes. So anyway, my thoughts on the soundtrack LP, which may have little to do with the music heard in the film, though hoshuteki assures me that "Everything I Own" is as dire on film as on disk.

( David Bowie )

( Velvet Underground )

( Nick Drake )

( Wilco )

( Bunch of indie and not-quite-as-indie bands I've never heard of )

( I Can't Go On, I'll Go On f. Aly Michalka )

( Aly Michalka )

( I Can't Go On, I'll Go On f. Vanessa Hudgens )

This New York Times profile of Vanessa Hudgens did what the preview clips didn't do for Bandslam, which was to make me somewhat interested in seeing the movie (though I'll be happy to wait for it to show up at my local library on DVD sometime in the next several years). I'm skeptical about the article's storyline - don't see how shy emo girl who blossoms on the rock stage in Bandslam is a major shift in persona from shy science geek who blossoms on the musical stage in High School Musical* - but what grabbed my attention was director Todd Graff saying that he wanted to tell the "story of Brian Epstein at 16."

Also, someone involved in the movie must be a Tom Lehrer fan.

*I've only seen the first HSM movie, however, so I don't know if Gabriella's character stayed the same for the two that followed.

Vanessa Hudgens is a Nice Girl type so she's not going to get all sassy and slutty like Danity Kane, but on three of the songs on Identified she multi-tracks her voice into harmonic blobs like the Danitys', and the results are beautiful. Search for "Identified," also "First Bad Habit" and "Amazed"; in addition there's some of the retro-show-biz blues that everyone's doing and that she has to work too hard at to get fun out of, but she does get there. More immediately fun is club track "Hook It Up," where she goes through the motions of being tuff and electro. "Party On The Moon," a song about partying on the moon, is surpassed in outer-spaciness by a synthy bonus number called "Set It Off," about a guy who triggers her alarm circuits and she encourages him to continue. Second half of the album is duller than the first, Vanessa never achieves persona or character, but there's a good amount of good sound.