Review: Where The Wild Things Are Soundtrack

This analysis will be a CD review of Karen O & The Kids and their Where the Wild Things Are Soundtrack. My favorite book growing up was Where the Wild Things Are and when Spike Jonze directed the movie, I could only say that my having a countdown was one of the least embarrassing things I did in preparation for this film. One thing that really made this movie was the music. At first, I thought, “What is that noise?” After watching the movie when it came out on DVD multiple times, I started to like the music more and more. What’s even more is that I’m the type of person who has every Lil Wayne, KanYe West, Jay-Z and Juelz Santana track ever released or bootlegged. I didn’t have this Indie Pop/Rock genre that was featured on the CD. Further, I’m a huge fan of Hip-Hop (very obvious from the previous sentence), and because I spend so much time listening to this genre, I don’t pay attention to artists like Karen O & the Kids. This paper will give a brief rundown of each track, the instruments used, and wrap up with whether or not the CD was a unified piece of work and how that fit into the motion picture.
Track 1 Food is Still Hot – This piece mainly utilizes an acoustic guitar, a slight piano in the background, and a type of woodwind blended into the singer’s voice. Midway through the song, horns start to play. There are no words, but the singer is humming and singing a type of melody. The track does a good job of blending all the instruments to sound like a unified piece.
Track 2 Sailing Home – There are drums, electric guitar, and symbols used to make this track. Again, there are no words, but the singer sings a melody backed by children singing the same thing. I don’t know how to explain it, but the track gave me the impression of sailing on a boat.
Track 3 All is Love – There are two acoustic guitars playing (one is panned completely left and the other completely right) along with a drum and shakers. The singer again teams up with children to sing “LO-VE. It’s a. Mystery. Where you’ll. Find me. Where you’ll. Find. All is love.” Whistling is incorporated in the track and it could be considered as an instrument when used in this context.
Track 4 Animal – This track uses dialogue from the movie. The track title is perfect as it sounds very tribal – music you would hear in a jungle. Karen O & the kids use standard instruments (guitars, drums, and symbols) but make them sound like something completely different – similar to our using plug-ins, like bit crushers and phasers in GarageBand. This track is definitely made complete with the Indian/Native American sounding chants and screaming in the background.
Track 5 Building All is Love – This track utilizes all the instruments from All is Love and is actually the same track but the music is sped up.
Track 6 Capsize – The main instrument in this track is a clapping rhythm. This track has no singing but instead uses rapping/chanting. This is another one of the tracks that has the singer singing a no-word-melody.
Track 7 Cliffs – This is another track that pans one acoustic guitar to hard left and another playing something different to hard right. Again, there are no words being sung, instead just a melody being sung. This track was actually playing during a lonely par in the movie when Max was alone; it has the perfect sad and alone tone to capture the feeling of the scene.
Track 8 Heads Up – This is the most mainstream sounding song. A guitar and drums are the only instruments utilized. It reminds me of The Hush Sound’s song We Intertwined. It’s the perfect hangout song because it sounds like a group of friends made it together playing the instruments they have in the basement.
Track 9 Igloo – Simple. Simple. Simple. This track has an acoustic guitar and something like a xylophone or an instrument that can play clear high notes. The only singing is that of – surprise – a melody.
Track 10 Lost Fur – This looks like the song that inspired the artwork for the soundtrack. It is an acoustic guitar playing with a martini-bar style piano. There is no singing and it sounds very sad – like a wild thing just lost its fur.
Track 11 Rumpus – Similar to track 4, this song is another jungle-esque track that features the same instruments and similar chanting. “Go Wiiiiiild!” is sung throughout (emphasizing the track’s title). The last 45 seconds or so seem to be like when a child is coming down from a sugar rush – it’s much calmer and slower.
Track 12 Rumpus Reprise – This track starts up where track 11 left off – back from the nap with more sugar in the system. The melody changes half way through the song and then becomes a bit of a march.
Track 13 Wideaway – This track definitely has multiple acoustic guitars and basses playing with different levels of distortion. The singer sounds very soulful and reminds me of how I feel after a perfect day with friends on the beach (similar to Max after his first day on the island of the wild things) – very relaxed and a feeling of distance from anything troublesome (which Max was trying to get away from in the movie).
Track 14 Worried Shoes – Another track that utilizes the distorted piano and a xylophone. “My worried shoes”, “I made a mistake that I never forgot”, “tied knots in the laces of my worried shoes” and melodies are sung throughout the piece. This is a perfect track to end the album as Max is coming full circle (in the movie) and after acting wild and crazy, realizes that he just doesn’t want to lose his mom. This song is how he felt about his possibly losing his mom to another man but then comes to accept it because it makes his mom happy.
This is definitely not an album that I would normally even consider listening to. There are very few words in any of the tracks – if at all – but then I realized, that’s not what music is. Lyrics in a song are a form of music. Music is art that is expressed audibly. The way the basic instruments are distorted along with the soothing – and sometimes eerie – sung melodies and creative way of playing the instruments and using chants, claps, and whistles to give a jungle vibe was definitely impressive. What needs to be understood from this album is that it is a soundtrack for a movie about a rebellious kid, Max, who runs away from home when he feels threatened by the man his mom is now dating and lives among the wild things. They have wild rumpus time but he grows tired of this when he misses his mom and sees that his best friend/wild thing, Carol, has the same demeanor and characteristics as him. He realizes that he has to grow up and end the wild rumpus (this end is signified in the album in the final track, track 14). What’s most important about this album and makes it so unique is that it embodies children – all the tracks have some form of chanting or singing of melodies and not many sung lyrics – this is because young children have the hyper energy that the music has but they aren’t great singers, so they try and sing the melody (which every track does brilliantly, with the lead singer, Karen O, singing extremely high and child like to sound like she recorded kids). This album goes to show that art really can come in any form.