Rob Price
Gutbrain Records
rob + gutbrain.com = email


2020 June 15 • Monday

It took a longer time than expected for the 626th Soundtrack of the Week to get an official release but here it is! The music from Freaked, not just the score by Kevin Kiner but also the songs from the movie, including local favorites Blind Idiot God!

It's on totally freaked vinyl!

My brother and I saw this movie in the theatre when it came out and kept our ears open for Blind Idiot God. We didn't hear much of them at all, except for the main title song. But that's them backing Henry Rollins and the song is more in his style than in theirs. Good song, though, and nice to have it here.

"Rip/Stop" sounds more like them but it's only about fifteen seconds long, so not exactly a mystery that we would have missed it during the movie.

"Midget Man Skank" finds them in dub mode and is a really cool number but also quite short at about a minute and a half.

The last piece from them is "Gluehead Stomp" which is another agreeably loud and pounding instrumental. Only a minute long though!

What else is on here?

Paul Lear's "Gumby Jack Flash" is a blazing and blistering high-energy heavy rock instrumental.

"Hideous Mutant Freekz" by Axiom Funk is good and has great grooves but is kind of long at over seven minutes.

Tim Burns's "Pick-a-Freek" sounds like 8-bit music for a video game and there's quite a lot of it, almost four minutes' worth.

Butthole Surfers have two songs on here, the hilarious "Sweat Loaf" which jumps off of Black Sabbath's "Sweet Leaf" and the Melvins-ish "Butter Queen".

Finally there's a demo for a title song that Iggy Pop did for the movie but I guess wasn't used. The filmmakers were hoping for something more like the Repo Man theme and what Iggy gave them was more sedate.

That's the first LP, which covers the songs from the movie. Sides three and four contain the score.

Kevin Kiner's soundtrack covers a lot of musical ground energetically and efficiently, easily keeping up with movie's madcap pace. There are 35 cues on one LP, so you won't be surprised to learn that many of the cues are quite short.

The "Intro" is suitably dramatic and building and then "Sky's Theme" captures perfectly the style of TV show opening credits of the period.

After that it was kind of difficult to match the tracks to the titles since I can't see the grooves on the record.

But suffice it to say that it's an incredibly dynamic and wide-ranging score that takes on numerous genres of music and creates some perfect dramatic underscore for a variety of moods.