Watchmen: Music from the Motion Picture – Various Artists

The Watchmen is listed in the New York Times Best 100 Novels, but has oft been cited as un-filmable due to both its dense multi-layered story telling and the dark and intense nature of those stories (see MovieMicros for a review). So gathering tracks to accompany such a tale is not an easy task, but this album does two things right. Firstly it does not mix the original score (an impressive one in its own right) with existing tracks used in the movie. Here we have but one “new” tune, My Chemical Romance’s somewhat bombastic but strangely amusing take on Bob Dylan’s Desolation Row, with a diverse but hand-picked collection of classics, each echoing the same dark and intense depths of the movie, the occasional glimpses of sunlight often fleeting – K.C. & The Sunshine Band’s I’m Your Boogie Man an obvious exception. With even a brief knowledge of the story-line it is not hard to hear in your head how Nat King Cole’s Unforgettable and Phillip Glass’s Pruit Igoe & Prophecies fits with Cohen’s Hallelujah and Simon & Garfunkel’s The Sound of Silence. Great artists, great songs adroitly selected.

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