Karen O and the Kids
Where The Wild Things Are - Motion Picture Soundtrack
(Warner)

We judge wallpaper on how well it serves the wall, the room in which it’s placed. But take that same strip of wallpaper and hang it in an art gallery, and should we still judge it by its function as wallpaper, or is it inviting closer inspection that it perhaps doesn't deserve?

Movie soundtracks often struggle to both serve an image and exist autonomously, given that each context demands different things of the music. On the surface, this record is full of that conflict. Deliberately pushed into consumer consciousness in advance of its parent film, Where The Wilds Things Are OST is at once an attempt to craft a cohesive, stand-alone body of music, and yet knowingly and continually refers the listener back to its original context via excerpts of film dialogue. In fact, the first thing we hear on the album is a kid muttering “goodnight,” to which his mother replies, “you could use a story.”

Does Karen O (of Yeah Yeah Yeahs fame), feature film director/ex-boyfriend Spike Jonze and their assortment of “kids” (Bradford Cox, Nick Zinner, Aaron Hemphill et al) successfully achieve the middle ground they aim for? Well I’ve not seen the film and so can’t judge how well matched these tracks are to Jonze’s images, but an educated guess plus countless views of the trailer tell me that it should make a great pairing. The music is dynamic and has a sense of naïve playfulness, often aided by the children’s choir that grace a lot of the tracks here. The arrangements are largely acoustic with clattering production, handclaps, and dry piano, successfully conjuring the romanticised simplicity of childhood. Lyrically, O keeps it simple, with big refrains repeating “all is love,” or her and the kids misspelling the word ‘capsize’ as the main hook to the song of the same name.

As a stand-alone album, it serves its purpose. Most of the songs are longer than two minutes, which suggests that this isn’t merely a collection of incidental passages but songs proper. Still, some of these tracks don’t expand upon the ideas presented in the first thirty seconds, while others start strong and gently wind down. It nonetheless evokes an appropriate and fairly palpable atmosphere if slightly eschewing a pop sensibility. Despite ambling, it never bores.

‘Capsize,’ ‘Rumpus,’ and ‘Heads Up’ provide the most single worthy material outside of actual lead single ‘All is Love,’ which appears twice. The cover of Daniel Johnston’s ‘Worried Shoes’ and the five-minute plus ‘Hideaway’ are the closest things to serious, self-contained songs. They are also the longest, slowest and quietest, ie. the least likely that, say, actual kids would  listen to, but are among the highlights for your more patient, above grade-school listeners.

For a project so intrinsic to the self-mythology of generations the world over, O manages to conjure a respectful soundscape pointing to the right mix of innocence and adventure. Where The Wilds Things Are OST sounds pretty much exactly what I imagined it would sound like. Which for a film we feel is ours before we've even seen it, is maybe the only success it needs.

Matt Hickey