Epic Soundtracks- Change My Life (1996) MP3 & FLAC

"Right on time the words that rhyme came crashing through the door."

The story of Epic Soundtracks is one of those bizarre, twisted tales you can only find in the annals of rock music. He and brother Nikki Sudden had grown up idolizing Can and T-Rex and eventually found their own musical ambitions realized in the form of the short-lived but legendary Post-Punk band Swell Maps. Soundtracks had adopted his ironic stage name well-before his success in this band but for some reason went to the trouble of establishing a copyright on it. As a result, he was (quite hilariously) able to force Epic Records to rename its soundtrack division by threat of a lawsuit. Post-Swell Maps, Soundtracks issued a few singles before taking over the drumming duties in Nikki Sudden's brilliant band of Jangle-Pop wastrels, the Jacobites and later played drums in Rowland S. Howard's Crime and the City Solution and These Immortal Souls. While this is certainly an interesting bio by any standards, he saved the strangest chapter for last: the 1990s resurrection of his fledgling solo career, this time as a piano-based pop balladeer (well, sort of). Epic Soundtracks released three solo-albums before his untimely death in November of 1997, the last of which was Change My Life on which he had started to vary some of the song arrangements by branching out into Jangle-Pop, Motown, and Big Star-inspired Power-Pop. For example, "Steal Away" has a decidedly Specter-era Motown feel, and features one of Soundtrack's trademark sweet and shaggy vocal turns that really shouldn't work, but it does. Another standout is "Wishing Well," which sounds like a ragged John Lennon piano ballad and offers a beautiful example of Epic Soundtracks' gift for pure pop convention. As with his brother, many critics tend to focus on Soundtrack's limited vocal abilities, but also like his brother, his voice carries a raw, immediate expressiveness that more than makes up for what it lacks in range and polish.

Change My Life 
 1. You Can Be My Baby  (2:40)
 2. Steal Away  (5:11)
 3. The Rain Came Down  (3:08)
 4. Something's Wrong  (2:44)
 5. Sweet Sixteen  (3:27)
 6. Landslide  (6:10)
 7. Ring the Bells  (3:23)
 8. Wild Child  (2:34)
 9. Sleep City  (3:35)
10. There's a Light Up in the Sky  (3:20)
11. The Wishing Well  (4:35)
12. Nightime/Thirteen (Live)  (4:30)

MU: Lossy (MP3@320)

MU: Lossless (FLAC)