The Uma Thurman vehicle's accompaniment leaves much to be desired...

Ceremony, the new comedy from director Max Winkler (son of Henry), sounds like a complicated story. Sam Davis (Michael Angarano) gets his former best friend to accompany him to a beachfront getaway owned by a famous documentary maker (Lee Pace). The plan is for the two to rekindle their friendship, but along the way, it is discovered that Sam is infatuated with the filmmaker’s fiancée, Zoe (Uma Thurman). His ultimate goal is to stop their wedding and win Zoe. Lakeshore Records is releasing the soundtrack, and if the description above didn’t sell you, neither will the album.

I was left really unimpressed with the soundtrack as a whole. The majority of the album is a score by Eric D. Johnson (not the Eric Johnson I would have hoped for), front man for the indie rock band Fruit Bats. His score is unoriginal and frankly, unimaginative. While not entirely without merit, the tracks are listenable, but they would better provide background noise than something for real listening. They vary in some degree in styles, with tracks like the opening “Overture”, which is a delicate acoustic piece with a piano and a harp, while “Dos Gauchos en El Camino” has a bit of a Latin flair. “At the Mohican” is an uninspired country-western piece, hailing back to the early days of recorded music, but never really feeling as though it has a life of its own. “Brief Encounter” starts off as an acoustic and slide guitar work, finally bringing some more of the band in to fill it out, but it doesn’t really take off. It’s repetitive, and really pretty bland.

“Zoe on the Beach” is another riff that goes nowhere other than to provide a background sound  Some nice acoustic guitar work, but it’s nothing special. “Married?!” tries out a surf guitar riff, and has a nice beat to it, but isn’t a stand out number. “Sam by the Window” is a slow, boring guitar riff that just repeats itself. Oh, how exciting. Johnson seems to want to do a lot of different things and try many different styles; he just needs to learn to do them well. His work seems to take one riff or theme and to basically continue it throughout the piece, with very little extrapolation or expanding of the idea. As simple background noise, the tracks work in a fundamental way, but there is little repeat listening value to them.

The rest of the soundtrack consists of popular artists who aren’t always represented in the best light here. Pete Townsend’s “La La La Lies” is not one that he should ever be remembered for, as it’s a boring bit of a pop song. “Never you Done That” by ska group General Public sounds like Men at Work meets 80s synth-pop, and not in a good way. “Plots and Entrees” by Van Dyke Parks is a cool sounding acoustic jazz guitar piece in the style of Django Reinhardt. Ringo Starr’s “It Don’t Come Easy” is a welcome addition to the mix. “Papa Hobo” by Ezra Koenig of the band Vampire Weekend is a strange, experimental sounding work that just sounds out of place, and isn’t very appealing. Even the always-great Eric Burdon & The Animals are done a disservice, represented by “Good Times”, a song that is good, but hardly one of their best. It’s a little generic of the period, sounding too similar to many other songs of the time.

I am not familiar enough with Fruit Bats to know if Johnson has anything else to offer, but overall, I am not impressed with this outing. Apart from a couple of the songs on here, there’s very little I would listen to again, much less recommend to anybody else. It’s not necessarily bad, but it’s far from great. This soundtrack most likely won’t appeal to you unless you happen to find yourself watching the movie and thinking “You know, I really would like to listen to this music again”. However, since that is highly unlikely, I will say that you would be better off saving your money. Ceremony isn’t exactly hooking me as a must-see movie anyway, and the soundtrack makes it seem less like one I’ll be actively seeking out.

Ceremony - Original Motion Picture Soundtrack will be released on April 12 by Lakeshore Records. Ceremony will open in limited release in theaters across the United States on April 8.

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