027: Inherent Vice (Original Motion Picture Soundtrack), by Jonny Greenwood and Linda Cohen

Jonny Greenwood and Linda Cohen (United Kingdom/USA)
Inherent Vice (Original Motion Picture Soundtrack) (2014)
17 tracks, 55 minutes
Spotify · iTunes

Inherent Vice is a really cool film. It’s a darkly humorous detective film set in the hippie’s Los Angeles of 1970. It’s quite like a noir in a way, but this film’s private investigator is well-baked instead of hard-boiled. It’s got a wonderful aesthetic, thanks to director Paul Thomas Anderson and director of photography Robert Elswit: it’s romantic and wistful and bittersweet; the colour is slightly washed-out and the film is grainy; it’s like a pot-hazed memory of twenty-odd years ago.

It also sounds just like it looks – the sign of a great soundtrack. The soundtrack as it exists in album form (we are 365 Good Albums after all) is about half-and-half for original soundtrack composed by Jonny Greenwood (best known as guitarist for Radiohead) and licensed music as selected by music supervisor Linda Cohen.

Greenwood’s compositions for this soundtrack serve mostly to evoke feelings and play with tensions – making you feel a bit nervous or suspicious here, relief or sadness there. It’s mostly performed by the Royal Philharmonic Orchestra, with Greenwood and others guesting on the less orchestral instruments now and then. You can hear the noir influence in these pieces, I think – quite late-Romantic (in the Western art music sense) with the slightest of influence of jazz, in some cases a big dollop of Philip Glass, and hints at Greenwood's experimental rock pedigree all the while. In a different film, this would be perfect music for slinking around dark New York streets, but for Inherent Vice, it fits equally well with wandering around Los Angeles in a heat- and dope-induced daze.

It’s the licensed tracks that stick with me. Whereas Greenwood’s orchestral OST helps build the emotions of the film, these tracks give a real sense of place – even when that place is a bit disturbing and jarring. The highlight is Can’s psychedelic ‘Vitamin C,’ which gets stuck in my head every single time without fail and is exactly as cool as the film itself. There’s also the laid-back country of Neil Young and soul from Minnie Riperton and Chuck Jackson...but then you’re hit out of left-field with the creepily cheerful crooning-and-whistling of Kyu Sakamoto or sort-of surf from the Marketts. It’s all pretty strange and it works.

There’s also a couple of tracks that are somewhere in the middle – technically-OST and Jonny Greenwood-composed, but tracks instead of orchestral pieces that do an excellent job of knitting the two together. It’s seamless in some cases, especially with Joanna Newsom as narrator, reading beat-like monologues from the film over the music every so often.

This album is a great distillation of the film’s soundtrack, and enjoyable enough to listen to on its own. But don’t let that suffice: its real magic is its place in one of my favourite films. Come over and we’ll have a smoke and a giggle and watch and listen and then we’ll have, y’know, world peace.