Edukators [Enhanced]

I just want to make it clear that this CD is NOT the soundtrack to the movie "The Edukators". For some reason they've allowed the title of the movie to be attached as a label to this anthology of songs with little in common and none of which were featured in the movie. When the movie itself is such an intense statement against capitalism, it's pretty low to do this.

I absolutely loved the movie The Edukators, and a major reason for that was the soundtrack. This is an eclectic mix of music that covers a variety of moods and sounds. If you've seen and enjoyed the movie or if you just like to listen to something that's not overplayed mainstream top 40 music, I highly recommend this cd.

Grooved on the film and had to pick up the soundtrack - because lets face it, if you like a movie the soundtrack is always going to resonate more with you than if you just downloaded a bunch of random tunes huh?

Released in the mid 2000's the German language film The Edukators dealt with what can happen when the naivety and certainty if missionary youth gets a touch out of hand and delivers the young people into a tricky situation. Not to mention their own hormones and emotional turmoil causing issues. Now the reason I point this out is to set the seen for what sort of music you'll find on this soundtrack album. Yep, eclectic arty stuff you could imagine `Left wing cool' college kids would listen to.

So we get a whole range of bands, and in fact that makes for an interesting listen and as most of the songs have at least some cool aspect the whole double disc collection makes for pretty handy background noise. Be warned that as you may well expect of a German language film a number of these tunes are in that language. Which in a way is kind of a nifty novelty for a mono-language dude such as myself. Many of these bands were previously unknown to me however a few big names do crop up such as Placebo, Franz Ferdinand, Depeche Mode and Leonard Cohen.

Hard to argue with the quantity here - 33 tracks and a video spread over two discs though the liner notes are a tiny bit perfunctory but value is added as some of the director and a couple of the actors have done them. My only two criticisms in order to annoyance value would be a) there wasn't much `angry young man' music in the film and therefore not much here. Given the age of the players and the ultimately invasive shenanigans they are getting up to in the movie this was a tiny surprise for me and most tragically b) the most poignant point of synergy of vision and sound in the film is IMHO the scene where Halleluja is playing while the three young leads are in emotional pain. The version in the film is haunting and soul touching. The version here is not that same and lacks the simple resonance of the film version.

Those two points aside if you loved the film you may well get value from picking up this 2CD release however be warned that there are few big names here, some non English language numbers and few undiscovered gems to be found. 3.5 stars for this `un.

› Go to Amazon.com to see all 4 reviews  3.8 out of 5 stars