Various artists
"La La Land: Original Motion Picture Soundtrack"
(Interscope (ASTERISK)(ASTERISK)(ASTERISK))
You can't have a visually arresting modern movie musical without an aurally dazzling set of songs. So for every fantastical bit of film energy from "La La Land" writer-director Damien Chazelle, there's an equally rousing tune to go with it from the flick's composer, Justin Hurwitz, with lyrics from musical theater's hottest team: Justin Paul and Benj Pasek.
The tale of two stardom-hungry showbiz kids (Emma Stone, Ryan Gosling) in various stages of love and support for the other in Los Angeles is guided, at first, by a let's-put-on-a-show razzle-dazzle of brass and reeds. When fragile-but-lovely vocalist Stone and gal pals Callie Hernandez, Sonoya Mizuno and Jessica Rothe get to singing "Someone in the Crowd," it's a fresh-faced stomper in the tradition of West Side Story's "I Want to Live in America."
As the Gosling portion of "La La Land" involves his frustration with being a deep jazz pianist in a pop jazz world (the latter represented, oddly enough, by John Legend and his slick fuzak "Start a Fire"), numbers like "City of Stars" have a cool Cali-jazz feel a la Bobby Troup. The upbeat piano prance of "Another Day of Sun" sums up "La La Land" handsomely: "a Technicolor world made out of music and machine / It called me to be on that screen."
_A.D. Amorosi
