This may very well be the finest example of pure soundtrack ever created — not merely a collection of tunes and interludes but a truly transporting listening experience capable of conjuring the film’s vivid imagery sight unseen.
It’s that rare pastiche for which the sampled dialogue and effects (something most movie tie-ins skip) matter as much as the music. If you’ve seen Coppola’s gobsmacking masterpiece, the album enables you to relive it, condensing it to 96 minutes by focusing on key sequences; if you haven’t, and what are you waiting for, this gatefold set lets your imagination fill in the visuals the same way radio plays once did. Nearly equaling the surround-sound engulfment only cinema can provide, this masterfully mixed montage nonetheless stands as its own towering achievement, overlapping waves of sounds and score and spoken bits that conjure a surrealism separate from celluloid. Which begs a fair question I’ve yet to answer: That new Mondo Records pressing, presented as a companion to the definitive ‘Final Cut’ of 2019 as we approach the original’s 45th anniversary — does it live up to the same Hanoi-gold standard? It sure *looks* impressive; such high quality is expected of Mondo. But is it in fact the very same soundtrack, complete with Martin Sheen’s dead-end narration, pulsating helicopters and so much more? Or is it mostly Carmine Coppola’s innovative synth portions? Is the Doors’s intense and Oedipal epic ‘The End’ still split in half by Willard’s realization that he’s still in Saigon, unassigned? If so, do I really need it? Or do I need it all the more for being different?
#SoundtrackSunday 025
‘Apocalypse Now’
Elektra, 1979
d: Francis Ford Coppola