BAD COMPANY: SOUNDTRACK

Review by Brad Green:
It’s very simple. If you’re a fully-fledged, gold chain flaunting, backwards baseball cap-wearing, designer sneaker-collecting rap enthusiast you’ll find this soundtrack passable. Otherwise you’ll pass.

All the artists on this album can talk real fast, rhyme in rhythm and project a diction that suggests they mean business. It’s a talent, but it grows tired very quickly. Especially when we’ve heard it all before. 

Excellent production and a few tuneful hooks between the rap rants does not make up for the fact that there’s nothing here to shake the soul. 

What should make up for it is the final track: a cue from Trevor Rabin’s score. Rabin was the songwriter, singer and all round musical wizard from Yes, one of pop music’s few seriously brilliant bands. Yet all he can muster here are clichéd electronic dance patterns overlaid with depressingly trite string flourishes. Sort of like a muzak version of The William Tell Overture meets the Magnificent Seven with a beat mixed in by a ho hum DJ, only cheesier. 

There’s not a single track to get excited about on this album, although some do have redeeming features: a ripping guitar solo on Outkast’s Bombs Over Baghdad; some soulful harmonies on an otherwise lame version of All Out Of Love and the odd imaginative arrangement underneath the rap banalities. None of which is nearly enough for moi thank you very much. 

As for Rabin, I’ll put it down to hanging with the crowd. He ain’t exactly in Grand Company here. 

Published July 18, 2002