Music reviews. CD reviews. Critically hip!

The dry humor of the movie Year of the Dog is not portrayed in the twinkling sounds of its music. In fact, the Year of the Dog soundtrack is comprised of lots of brief, beautiful instrumental songs which I imagine were created to lighten up the mood of the movie which actually has a sentimental message in the end. Perhaps audiences appreciated the music’s addition to the scenes and the overall feeling of the movie. However, as an album, the soundtrack does not have much substance. I just cannot imagine wanting to sit down to listen to an album that contains snippets of theme music that sometimes only spans all of thirty seconds. Based on its nature I am not entirely sure why they’ve decided to make the soundtrack available for listening to apart from the movie.

I began to think about The Royal Tenenbaums soundtrack in comparison to the Year of the Dog soundtrack just because both contain very short snippets of songs from their movies. The difference between these two soundtracks is that The Royal Tenenbaums soundtrack alternates these short theme songs with longer songs that were used in the movie and are performed by various artists. I’m not saying that Year of the Dog should have had full length songs in the movie just to create a better soundtrack. However, I think it is only worth creating a soundtrack if it is more cohesive and something people would want to listen to on its own. I was surprised and disappointed that the song "I Love My Dog" by Cat Stevens was not in the Year of the Dog soundtrack just because it was the song I heard on all of the trailers I saw and is also on the homepage of the movie’s website.

Overall the music in the movie Year of the Dog may be very pretty but I do not think that it makes good album material. In order for me to want to purchase this album I would need something more to grab onto.