FRANKIE'S HOUSE (OST)

This is not a great Jeff Beck album, as it is filled mostly with incidental music. It is a soundtrack, you know. The majority of this album is keyboard sound collages, not bad as they are, with some nice guitar playing layered on top. The recording quality is crystal clear, and Becks playing is not bad, but many of the pieces seem to fade away just as thay start getting good.

There are two real songs here. The first is "Hi-Heel Sneakers", a song by Tommy Tucker (Robert Higginbitham) made famous by some guy named Elvis Presley. This version rocks immensely, with Beck playing slide guitar to perfection. The other song is "Cathouse", another fine rockin' tune.

But two songs don't an album make. For Beck completists only.

One of the lesser known under the radar releases by JEFF BECK was his collaboration with keyboardist, composer and producer Jed Leiber on the soundtrack for the Australian A&E Networks television movie mini-series FRANKIE'S HOUSE. The series itself starred Iaian Glen and Kevin Dillon and narrated the gruesome encounters of a journalist photographer capturing the atrocities of the Vietnam War. The four part series was quite graphic and gruesome leaving no violence, horror and gore unseen. Like most soundtracks, the music presented on this release was designed to accompany the visual storyline and yank the right emotional tugs when called for. In that regard it was quite effective.

The series featured four 50-minute or so episodes however this musical release featured 15 tracks that add up to just under 41 minutes. I'm not entirely certain if this release features every snippet of music from the series or just a condensed album's worth. I tried to watch the first two episodes of the series in order to understand the context of the music at hand but i gave up after about an hour in due to the explicit violence that resulted in too many visits from the grim reaper. The series presents a hyper-realistic display of how things played out during that horrible conflict. The realistic depictions are too real for comfort.

Without the context of the film the musical presentations are somewhat abstract actually. This one features a bizarre mix of JEFF BECK offering his best boogie rock and bluesy licks either in snippets or in the case of a couple tracks like "Hi-Heel Sneakers," bonafide rock and roll tunes along with Jed Leiber conjuring up dark ambient sounds, gloomy atmospheres and depressive drones on his keyboard selections. Whoever thought of mixing depressive ambient music with more upbeat blues guitar was on to something because the contrast is quite effective in conveying the ups and downs of the war machine. The series features the soldiers alternating between celebratory downtime and unexpected bursts of violence resulting in the bloodiest of death. The music conveys this seesaw effect perfectly.

As far as JEFF BECK is concerned, the music follows in the footsteps of "Jeff Beck's Guitar Shop" with instrumental bluesy rock guitar crafting nice riffs and tasty high and low speed soloing. While BECK and Leiber spend most of the album handing off duties in rotation, often they demonstrate their craft in tandem which offers some of the most memorable moments. Added to the bluesy rock motifs are Southeast Asian folk tones and timbres that evoke the dangerous forests, tense city life and spooky P.O.W. camps that littered the countryside. BECK a master of tone and timbre manipulation himself, offers some fine counterpoints with eerily creepy slow guitar slides and lugubrious reverb. The music offers no percussion other than an occasional heartbeat sort of sound courtesy of Leiber's versatile keys.

The album is nicely broken up into snippets of bluesy guitar, Vietnamese traditional sounds and eerie ambient music with cloudy atmospheres. Considering the music's limited scope in being forced to craft entire mood swings in mere seconds, BECK showcases some amazing guitar playing skills that showcase his status as a guitar god within the context of minimalism. Likewise Leiber proves to be a master of delivering the proper reaction to the visual contents through ambience, atmospheric and occasional organ playing with occasional forays into funk and other styles. The track "Apocalypse" is one of the most terrifying gloomy things i've ever heard and i've heard a lot of downer music for sure.

For me a soundtrack has to stand up on its own outside the context of the film or series it was designed to play over and in that regard FRANKIE'S HOUSE delivers an exhilarating mix of blues rock, progressive electronic and ambience peppered with Southeast Asian flavors. Without getting too flashy, JEFF BECK provides an elegant counterpoint to the other dreary synthesized sounds courtesy of Jed Leiber. While many may find this to be too disjointed for its own good, this is the kind of oddball mix that really works for me. It's like a honky tonk jamboree at the blues club one minute and a depressive dive into atmospheric bleakness the next. My kinda mood swing music as bipolar as the album cover art suggests. A beautiful slice of ugliness that has gone virtually unheard in JEFF BECK's larger canon but certainly one that should be experienced at least once. This is the kind of music i can totally listen to without any reference to the film. In short, i really like this one a lot.