Juno Recommends Soundtracks August 2022

Review: You might be more familiar with Bobby Krlic's long-established moniker, The Haxan Cloak, with two critically acclaimed studio albums already out under that name. Here, he steps out from behind the veil (ahem) for the latest example of just how far video game soundtracks are going these days. Returnal is a third-person shooter set in space, wherein players land on a distant planet in search of the White Shadow, a mysterious signal that has been emanating from the region.

Sadly, things don't go too well, as we wind up trapped in a time loop, really just wanting to go home and make some sense of what's happening. Krlic's score does that surreal and unnerving plot proud, moving between these huge, epic, Blade Runner-esque moments of stretched synth refrains to collages of eerie chimes and whispered abstract noises.

Review: "A group of high school students struggle with drugs, love, social media and money as they come of age while trying to establish their identity," the top Google result for Euphoria tells us. Cut from a very familiar cloth, the teenage experience is arguably the most documented in television and film of any experience, save for love (often a tandem theme). Within those pantheons of on-screen entertainment, there are good, bad and awful outings, but almost all are consistently on-point when it comes to the score.

Whether you like Euphoria the show, then, is almost irrelevant. The soundtrack is typically strong stuff, running the gamut from retro rock drama by INXS, to tender alt-balladry nodding to acoustic Kate Bush by Lana Del Rey and the unnecessarily overbite-inducing pop-trap of Labrinth. A window into the time in which it was produced - today eras and genres have melted into a big mess of on-demand sound.

Review: Tava Tava Rare is a pretty apt name for the label behind this strangely captivating and utterly bizarre release. And we don't actually know what Tava Tava means. Rare in the truest sense, UFO Robot Grendizer was a 1970s Japanese animated series that very few people will have heard of outside the country in which it was made, let alone have seen or experienced the soundtrack as it was designed.

What this means is the tunes here have a kind of open-ended meaning, removed from their intended context. And, free from the trappings of a specific show and its iconography, we're left with tunes that are grand, dramatic, emotionally charged, witty, sincere, and spanning a full spectrum from tense and captivating to pomp and pageantry. They really don't make them like this anymore.