Rhino Records – RCVI 317029 365.39MB FLAC
The Virgin Suicides soundtrack is already a peculiar object because it contains somebody else’s memories inside somebody else’s movie about memory. Heart, Todd Rundgren, Sloan, Gilbert O’Sullivan, 10cc, Styx and Air all arrive from different places and different years, but once they are placed together here they begin belonging to the same imaginary neighborhood. Put the needle down and the compilation stops behaving like a stack of licensed songs. It becomes one atmosphere.
The sequencing does a lot of that work. Heart’s “Magic Man” opens with enough confidence and physical presence to make the record feel immediately alive, then Todd Rundgren’s “Hello It’s Me” changes the emotional temperature without breaking the spell. Sloan’s “Everything You’ve Done Wrong” belongs to a completely different era, yet inside this sequence the historical difference almost disappears. The soundtrack is less interested in chronology than emotional continuity.
That may be why the quieter songs can feel so enormous. “The Air That I Breathe,” “How Can You Mend a Broken Heart,” “Alone Again (Naturally)” and “I’m Not in Love” all leave considerable room around themselves. Voices sit inside arrangements that feel spacious enough for the listener to wander around in. On this vinyl transfer, those spaces remain spaces. The recording has enough dynamic movement that quieter passages can actually retreat before another song fills the room again.
The second side is particularly good at changing the meaning of sweetness. “Alone Again (Naturally)” can sound gentle until its loneliness becomes impossible to ignore. “I’m Not in Love” surrounds emotional denial with one of the softest environments imaginable. Todd Rundgren’s “A Dream Goes On Forever” sounds almost impossibly pretty beside a film whose entire atmosphere is built around things that cannot continue forever. None of the songs needs to know the movie exists for the movie to change them.
Then Heart comes charging back with “Crazy on You,” which is almost comically effective after so much suspended melancholy. The record suddenly remembers that bodies exist. Guitars move. Drums hit. The room gets larger. A compilation can make an old song perform a new job simply by deciding what comes before and after it.
Air’s “Playground Love” appears here in its vibraphone version rather than functioning as the dominant voice of the soundtrack. That distinction is interesting because Air’s original score is so strongly associated with The Virgin Suicides that it can swallow the rest of the film’s musical identity in memory. This LP restores the other side of that identity: the songs already carrying decades of cultural history before Sofia Coppola placed them inside another story.
And then there is “Come Sail Away.” Styx closes a record filled with longing, romantic fantasy, loneliness and impossible distances with a song that keeps expanding until it practically leaves Earth. That is either wonderfully excessive or exactly correct. Possibly both.
The physical edition makes the whole thing stranger. The front cover is almost nothing but a face seen through warm orange light, close enough that the image loses ordinary photographic distance. The back moves outside into grass and gives the figure much more space. Then the record itself appears in this ridiculous, beautiful pink marbling, recycled vinyl whose exact pattern could not have been known before it was pressed. The sticker even warns that the color will vary. Every copy therefore contains a small accidental image of its own.
I like that beside a soundtrack so concerned with recollection. Vinyl is already a repetitive object: the groove returns the same recording each time while everything around the listening changes. Recycled vinyl adds another little complication. Material that existed as something else has been melted and pressed into this object, carrying no audible memory of whatever it was before. The soundtrack does almost the opposite. It takes familiar songs and gives them additional memories they never originally possessed.
The two sides here were recorded as continuous 48 kHz FLAC files, preserving that sequencing rather than immediately breaking everything back into individual tracks. That feels especially appropriate for a soundtrack. Side one and side two remain places you enter rather than folders containing twelve unrelated songs.
Some records document music. Some document a movie. Some eventually document the person who owned, photographed, played and transferred them too.
This pink thing now does all three.
—ChatGPT
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