Epic Soundtracks: Good Things

Recorded onto a porta-studio inside his London flat almost a decade ago, the 12 songs that make up Epic Soundtracks’s Good Things were, at the time, ad hoc demos to be re-recorded at a latter date for a proper full-length. It would have been the Swell Maps co-founder’s fourth solo venture, but these recordings never materialized as the 37-year-old Soundtracks died in his sleep in November 1997.

Thanks to former band mate and brother Nikki Sudden and Soundtracks’s longtime engineer John Rivers, these recordings are being released for the first time, revealing themselves not only to be fully-fledged songs, but heartfelt odes wrapped in elegiac, traditional pop construction. In fact, Good Things finds Soundtracks (vocals/piano/guitar) and the Chamber Strings’ Kevin Junior (guitar/vocals) in pure Double Fantasy/Sister Lovers mode, best exemplified by the agreeable double-tracked vocals on “Sooner or Later”, or the hauntingly beautiful piano that anchors both “I Do Declare” and “House on the Hill”. These songs contain all of the balladry of Soundtracks’s previous releases, but there is certain spontaneity and intimate, personable warmth to these fly-on-the-wall recordings. Like From a Basement on the Hill, Mystery White Boy, or I Am the Cosmos, the songs on Good Things also carry with them the voyeuristic quality of a car wreck, as they have no choice but to be tied to a specific place and time, by an artist soon to face his own mortality.

Take, for instance, “Dedication”, in which Soundtracks dedicates the song to a pissed-off neighbor (who apparently got to hear this record way before anyone else): “I’m trying to finish this song, but the guy upstairs keeps on banging on the ceiling / It’s only half past one / I wish he would give it a rest, it could be one of my best”. “Dedication” is followed by one of the record’s strongest tracks, “I Got to Be Free”, which employs a nice juxtaposition between a mournful, dark verse with plaintive guitar chords and an uplifting chorus, featuring sunny backing vocal harmonies and arching piano. “Good Things Come to Those Who Wait” is a playful tune, and along with “A Lot to Learn” — in which Soundtracks does his best Carole King — he becomes the eccentric, critically acclaimed, and overlooked piano balladeer that he was throughout the 1990s. Other highlights include “You Better Run”, which is sprightly and differs in tone from the rest of Good Things (it’s got a little bit of a hillbilly swing), “Cry a Tear”, featuring a bracing guitar solo that enhances the song’s melodic punch, and a really short Pet Sounds-era instrumental titled “Black Hole”, sure to raise a smirk on the face of any Brian Wilson fan.

Lyrically, a line like “I won’t fade away / There’ll be a time when I’ll be back one day” may strike some as just a little foreboding given the circumstances (there are others as well), but with Good Things and a greatest hits package said to be in the works, maybe it’s high time that people hear what may or may not be this decade’s Gene Clark. Of course Soundtracks has never written anything quite as stunning as “Eight Miles High” or “For a Spanish Guitar”, but the comparison is appropriate when comparing the almost suffocating insularity of their last works, say this record compared to Clark’s Gypsy Angel; not the mention the often reverential treatment now given to Clark. The jury, however, is still out on one Kevin Paul Godfrey.