When the film
This Is Spinal Tap
was released in 1984, it was a comedy that bore the ring of truth, a mockumentary about the excesses of heavy metal created by guys who had been close enough to the perimeters of rock & roll to know such foolishness firsthand.
Christopher Guest
,
Michael McKean
, and
Harry Shearer
were also talented enough to write and play like a past-prime British metal band who were starting to outlive their usefulness, and to pen songs that matched and were musically savvy but lyrically silly enough to be funny.
Spinal Tap
was a remarkable comic creation, but while
Guest
McKean
Shearer
's subsequent work as the fictive hard rockers from Squatney has always been entertaining and sometimes brilliant, their portrayal of
seems to have stylistically trapped them in the Smell the Glove era, where their
Deep Purple
- and
Uriah Heep
-informed rock was already aging into irrelevance. That was part of what made
work, but more than 40 years after the original film arrived, there's only so much gas left in the tank for the band, even if they're fictional and theoretically immortal.
The End Continues
, the soundtrack to the long-gestating cinematic sequel, This Is Spinal Tap II: The End Continues, is not up to the level of the original film's soundtrack LP, nor 1992's underappreciated album
Break Like the Wind
. Like most film soundtracks, it's hard not to feel as if you're missing something when listening to these songs without their visuals, but heard on this album,
's contributions, especially "The Devil's Just Not Getting Old" and "Rockin' in the Urn," are too obvious for their own good, and his voice here is ragged enough that he sounds like Otto the Bus Driver's grandfather.
and
fare better, with the former in fine fettle on the full-bodied "Brighton Rock" and the moody "Blood to Let," while
's "Angels" is an honestly lovely ballad that doesn't include any punch lines, and forces us to imagine maybe
were more talented than we thought. However, the remakes of previous
favorites fortified with guest stars sound anemic compared to the originals, and they beg the question, why would superstars like
Paul McCartney
or
Elton John
be working with third-stringers like
? The soundtrack to the original
was a hilarious evocation of the career of a band too mediocre for their own good;
suggests they should skip the farewell tour and just hang it up, and while there are funny and tuneful moments here, it's never quite as good as the work of their imagined salad days. ~ Mark Deming