Music reviews. CD reviews. Critically hip!

CATCH AND RELEASE was a chick flick that was released and few caught. I'm not sure what it was about; I consider a chick flick to be the first half of HOSTEL, every minute of …ALL THE MARBLES, you know what I mean. The genre is kind of lost on me. Goodwife Hartlaub no longer even asks me to take her to a movie, after I made an uncharitable, politically incorrect comment about A BEAUTIFUL MIND. So I was not expecting a lot from CATCH AND RELEASE: Music From The Motion Picture. And I wasn't disappointed.

First off, there’s a drug theme that runs through the song titles (“My Drug Buddy,” “Pills,” “Razor”), so before you go dragging your 14 year old daughter to either the movie or the CD you might want to check it out first and then empty the medicine cabinet. On second thought, however, you might need some drugs to get through the soundtrack. It begins with “Razor” by Foo Fighters. Now, somebody needs to say this: Foo Fighters does great rockers, but they release ballads that suck. “Razor” is a suck ballad, like the first track on a “Worst of Windham Hill” collection. Seriously. After a 25 minute acoustic guitar intro, Dave Grohl, noted climatologist and political commentator, warbles “Waaaake uuuup…” . Zzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzz. Where’s that razor? I want to open a vein. I know this is a chick flick, but it’s track seven, “The Winding Staircase” by New Radiant Storm King before we get to something that even comes close to sounding like a song you'd drive around the block for, unless you were looking for a hippie you could run over.

A great deal of CATCH AND RELEASE is Americana music, which is fine, sometimes. Unless you're listening to Paul Thorn or Robbie Fulks or something like that, however, everything in that genre tends to run together, like someone in Austin is releasing the same CD over and over and slapping a different name and cover on it. So too with this. Didn't catch the movie, and shouldn't have released this.