Moondust - The Search Of The Men Who Fell To Earth [Soundtrack]

Heavenly/Virgin

September 6, 2009, 10:29 PM

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Oh come on. How cool is this?

So Altsounds sends me this CD, right? It's a compilation titled Moondust. An incredible compilation. I haven't even stuck it in the CD player yet, and I'm already trying to figure out what to say about this incredible set of songs, apparently compiled by the People With Impeccable Taste Guild.

But so far I know nothing about this disc. So I do a Google search. What do I find? An Altsounds press release. Apparently I haven't been doing my due diligence. Then I read the release and my mind is blown. Like Scanners-style blown. Kabloooie.

This compilation is a soundtrack. For a book. A non-fiction book about the men who landed on the moon between 1969 and 1972. The songs on this album were selected by the author, former music journalist Andrew Smith. The author of Moondust selected songs for this soundtrack from the counterculture of the late 60s and added little tastes of other pieces that fit brilliantly together.


Check it out: the album opens with 'Prelude and Outer Space,' the theme from the original The Day The Earth Stood Still, and fades into 'Eight Miles High' by the Byrds, while interpolating JFK's speech about space exploration. Whoa. I mean, whoa. We then move right into Strawberry Alarm Clock's psychedelic milestone 'Incense and Peppermints.'

In an astounding gesture, John Fogerty allowed Virgin to include CCR's 'Bad Moon Rising' on the compilation. Fogerty won't let anyone get their hands on CCR's music, so this is an exciting treat. Moby Grape fans will get a kick out of the inclusion of 'Indifference,' the album closer from the band's self-titled 1967 debut. We then move through David Bowie's 'Moonage Daydream' (I mean, how can you make an album about astronauts and not include an offering from the Man Who Fell to Earth?) before the first really anachronistic inclusion, 'Do You Realize??' by The Flaming Lips, with a new intro that includes real audio from a NASA lift off sequence.

Ringo Starr's 'It Don't Come Easy' leads into a brief interlude that includes heavy breathing sounds and strange ambient noises that leads remarkably well into Jeff Buckley's impeccable and heartrending rendition of 'Hallelujah.' Richard Hawley's soulful and spacious 'Cry a Tear for the Man in the Moon' slows the procession of songs to a near standstill brought back up by Grateful Dead's laid-back shuffle 'Candyman.' I hadn't even heard of The Handsome Family before popping this album in the player, but their bluesy-folksy track 'Our Blue Sky' fits perfectly between the Dead and the second atmospheric interlude. This spacious break then passes into a phased-out remastering of a selection of Jimi Hendrix's 'Star Spangled Banner,' which evolves into Last Poets' 'Mean Machine' from their 1971 sophomore album This is Madness.

The one entry into this comp that really doesn't make sense to me is nonetheless an undeniably good track; 'A Love from Outer Space' by A. R. Kane sounds out of place on the album, but presumably was included because of its high listenability and (sort of) related subject matter. Maybe Andrew Smith just really likes London pre-triphop. Hungarian-born composer György Sándor Ligeti's 'Lux Aeterna' adds both a touch of classical composition and surrealism to the home stretch of the album and meshes almost too well into Brian Eno's ambient masterpiece 'An Ending (Ascent).'

Les Baxter's neoclassical/thematic composition 'Celestial Nocturne' featuring Dr. Samuel J. Hoffman on an eerily human-sounding theremin becomes a long slow prelude to Danny Williams' classic ballad 'Moon River,' a strange but beautiful inclusion to this album. The compilation closes with an unlikely but apt track: American Music Club's 'Western Sky,' sounds rather like Echo & The Bunnymen doing a country album, but the wide open and gentle track rounds out the album well and adds a touch of melodrama to an otherwise all-too WYSIWYG album.

All told, this is an incredibly well-organized and mastered album with amazing depth, breadth, and style. If you ever find yourself making a love mix for a beautiful woman from Venus, start your search here.

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