Album Review: The Motion Picture Soundtrack to Catching Fire

Are soundtracks still a big deal?

I remember the Spawn soundtrack being, like, a huge fucking deal when I was 14—the movie was tepid at best. But man, dat soundtrack—some recording industry genius at Sony thought it would be brilliant to take the Judgment Night formula and flip it so that it applied to a 1997 aesthetic—“hard rock” and “electronica” artists paired together on each song.

I guess movies are still made. I don’t really fuck with movies, honestly. No joke, I feel like the number of movies I have seen in 2013 barely breaks double digits. Like, I give very little fucks about anything these days. From what I understand, though, people make movies aimed at a certain demographic and are marketed with a soundtrack album guaranteed to do big things—it would seem that the Twilight related soundtracks were all compiled with this intent. I mean, they got ThomYorke to shit out a b-side for the New Moon soundtrack.

Thom fucking Yorke you guys.

The Hunger Games are apparently a “thing” that people care about. Or, like, a majority of people care about these games of hunger. To me, it sounds like a movie that’s just about a hot dog eating contest. But I guess it’s about something more than that.

Based on a wildly successful series of “Young Adult” books about a dystopian future, Catching Fire is the second Hunger Games motion picture to be released, and it comes along with a Top 40-ready, marquee name stacked soundtrack album.

Hey what’s up with the cover art? Can we talk about that for like a second? 

I mean I know Jennifer Lawrence has got dat ass or whatever, but this weird semi-realistic painting of her in this tight action-hero get up is bringing back some Marvel Masterpieces flashbacks. Ya’ll remember those?

Anyway…

Remember a decade ago (ouch) when Zach Braff made you a mixtape in the form of the soundtrack to his movie Garden State, and how with that push, indie rock as we know it pretty much shat itself? That same idea is applied here, although trading in P4K approved acts like The Shins; we’re now boasting acts as diverse as Coldplay AND Christina Aguilera.

Catching Fire is like a teenager’s iPod on shuffle.

Oh wow, The Weeknd shows up on not one, but TWO songs? I didn’t realize that the movie Catching Fire was going to be that rapey.

I would go out on a limb and say that a bulk of Catching Fire is unlistenable, or at the very least, painful listening. Appearances by some kind of post-Mumford faux-folk outfit The Lumineers, and something called Imagine Dragons are bad, sure, but pale in comparison to Lorde’s miscast cover of “Everybody Wants to Rule The World.”

Lorde—a name I see in music news headlines all the time and have no fucks to give for her—slows the song down to an unthinkable trudge, stripping away the melody and, like, any instrumentation, and chooses to replace it with big, theatric sounding timpani drums, big, theatric string arrangements, and phoned in, mumbled in a low register vocals. By the time it ends (thankfully it’s less than three minutes long), you’re left wondering what the point was.

It is without a doubt, one of the most embarrassingly bad covers I have ever heard, and possibly one of the worst songs of 2013.

Aside from the fact that nearly all of these songs are unmemorable, or just flat out terrible, the real issue that Catching Fire suffers from is how temporary this all is. Sure, some of these artists have been at it for a minute (Coldplay, Aguilera), some of them have had a slow rise over the last decade (The National), and shit—some of them are aging punk legend Patti Smith; but then you’ve got a band like Imagine Dragons that has one full length album to their name. Their success has come too quickly, will fade so fast, in grouping a bunch of artists like that on the same soundtrack, the whole thing has a “What’s hot in 2013” feeling that makes it all the more unfortunate of a listen.

I’ve never read any of the Hunger Games books, nor did I watch the first movie in the series. I will not watch this movie, nor will I watch the two subsequent movies coming out in the next few years. Like I said, I don’t give a fuck about much these days. The only reason that this is even on my radar, and that I even put forth the effort to give a listen is due to the inclusion of The National, and their song “Lean.”

Not an anthem for codeine and Sprite as I was hoping, “Lean,” is…you know…a song by The National. It’s moody and dark—slow burning, but slightly underdeveloped in comparison to the material on their most recent LP, Trouble Will Find Me. It fits in snugly between their two other well-known non-album tracks: “Exile, Vilify” from the video game Portal 2, and another motion picture contribution—the outstandingly somber “Think You Can Wait,” from Win Win.

Maybe out of the context of the movie, all of these songs make perfect sense for inclusion on this soundtrack. Maybe the strained pop sounds of Sia, featuring The Weeknd and production by Diplo, serves as the underscore to a montage of kids killing other kids in some kind of killing competition—at its heart, that’s what the Hunger Games is, right? It’s about killing, isn’t it?

But without that point of reference, I’m left with this—a compilation album that will certainly clean up in digital sales, and more than likely in hard copy sales as well. Some executives will be stacking their paper to the ceiling, a band called Of Mice and Men can always remember that time they were on the Catching Fire soundtrack, and teens everywhere will plunk down their money in the iTunes store as well as at the movie theatre. 

The world continues to turn. 

And I still don’t give a fuck.

If you must, Catching Fire is out now.