Bob’s Jukebox: The Crow Soundtrack

Hi everybody! Been a busy month, but I didn’t want to let Gothtober go by without an album review. As anybody who knew me in my early teens to late twenties can tell you, I have a plethora of self-indulgent choices, ranging from the obvious to the obscure (don’t worry Cure fans, I’ll be getting to Disintegration eventually). Fortunately for me, I was watching Awkward Ashleigh review The Crow, and I remembered how much I enjoyed the soundtrack which I also haven’t listened to in well over a decade, so here we are. (And not for nothing, but you should totally check out Awkward Ashleigh’s channel on YouTube. She’s adorkable.)

This album is pure 90s post-punk nirvana, with goth-industrial, alternative, and grunge all up in the mix, with only a single song at the end of the album being the lone dissenter. It’s so on-point in the artists and songs that were selected that, from the distance of a few decades, it almost feels like satire; it’s just that perfect at depicting a specific time in a particular sub-culture. There’s no fat on the bone here, no deviation from the clear focal point of the album (that one song not withstanding; it borders on being goth with its pretentious self-absorption). That is both a blessing and a curse; while I got exactly what I came for, by the time the album was over I couldn’t help yearning for some Neil Diamond or Captain and Tennille as a palette cleanser.

To be fair, there are a lot of bangers on this album. “Burn” by The Cure, “Golgotha Tenement Blues” by Machines of Loving Grace, “Big Empty” by Stone Temple Pilots, “Darkness” by Rage Against the Machine, “Color Me Once” by Violent Femmes, and “Milktoast” by Helmet. So, most of the first half of the album. There are a couple of minor exceptions though.

I enjoy “Dead Souls” by Nine Inch Nails, even if it is one of Trent Reznor’s more commercial entries. (For those of you who disagree, I refer you to basically anything off of The Downward Spiral. Seriously, even compared to “Closer” this is tame.) This may be because it’s a cover of a Joy Division song, although quite frankly just about anything off of Pretty Hate Machine would have worked for this movie. I guess they figured it was overdone by that point, and with Spiral releasing the same year as The Crow, Trent wanted to keep all the fresh stuff to himself.

“Ghostrider” by Rollins Band is… I mean, it’s Henry Rollins. Do you like Henry Rollins basically screaming into the microphone over top of screaming guitars and banging drums? If you’ve never tried it, I promise, it’s better than I make it sound. But it is a distinct sound, and either you’re gonna like it or you’re not. Personally, I kinda like it, but I’ve never been a Rollins fanboy, so it’s only just okay for me.

Then we get into the second half of the album, or as I like to call it, “we frontloaded the album so you would buy it without looking at the entire track list”. That’s not to say there’s no good songs here, far from it, but it definitely isn’t as strong.

“The Badge” by Pantera is another one that’s fine but not great. I’m just not much of a thrash metal fan, and there’s nothing about this song that’s going to change my mind on that count.

“Slip Slide Melting” by For Love Not Lisa is good but not quite great. I’d rate it somewhere between the big hitters that started the album and “Dead Souls”, more satisfying than the latter, not quite in the range of the former. “After the Flesh” by My Life with the Thrill Kill Kult is about the same, although with the caveat that I don’t see this one being for everybody (I just happen to be a Thrill Kill Kult fan).

“Snakedriver” by The Jesus and Mary Chain is about on par with “Dead Souls”, although I can see someone who is more of a fan of that specific alternative sound enjoying it more (again, this is my own personal bias creeping in; I’m not big on The Jesus and Mary Chain).

“Time Baby III” by Medicine is nice and mellow, leading into the aforementioned last song on the album, “It Can’t Rain All the Time” by Jane Siberry, which for all of my poking fun at it is still quite beautiful.

Would I recommend buying this album? That depends entirely on whether you like this specific sound. This album is very much of its time, and there are some songs on here you would have trouble finding anywhere else if at all. Then again, streaming services are a thing now, so there’s that. But there is something to be said to hearing them all together, experiencing the moment, as it were. If you don’t know if you like this sound, or this genre, this is an excellent sampler. If you do like it, this is also an excellent sampler. So yeah, I would definitely recommend it.