Grand Theft Auto

VARIOUS ARTISTS
Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas Official Soundtrack Box Set
(Interscope)

The success last year of the sensitive-indie-heavy Garden State soundtrack was just one more sign that we've settled firmly into the Age of Bricolage. iTunes and its less legitimate peers have made mixtape connoisseurs out of us all, so it makes sense that in America we'd look to culture to give us what we can make ourselves. The series of mixes from The O.C. showcased the curatorial possibilities of the form: "Dude, who are the Long Winters, and where can I purchase more of their modestly satisfying product?" The new eight-disc box set that accompanies Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas performs a different function: extending the wildly popular video game's concept into ours. (Rockstar Games' first attempt at this sort of market incursion—real-life consequences for drug trafficking and vehicular manslaughter—tested poorly with focus groups.) Each CD samples from a different San Andreas radio station, which means you can drive around in your hatchback blasting modern-rock Radio X without having to kill anyone in the process. It's not having your life changed by the same Shins song as Natalie Portman, but it's not bad.

For folks not looking to spice up the streets of suburban Wichita, what's compelling about the GTA box is its musical generosity. After all, this is the soundtrack for a game that manages to boil Scorsese-grade back story down to a cynical ambiance of crime-family whack jobs and white-flight urban decay. Yet each disc here plays like a mix by a particularly astute specialist: On Radio X, you get terrific boilerplate like the rain-king rush of Soundgarden's "Rusty Cage" and the Hollywood-sign stomp of Stone Temple Pilots' "Plush," but between the evergreens someone's idiosyncrasies start to show in choices like Danzig's high-romantic "Mother" and L7's grunge satire "Pretend We're Dead." K-DST, the classic-rock warhorse, accents "Free Bird" and Grand Funk Railroad with Rod Stewart's "Young Turks" and the least strident of all the Who's palsied white-funk gems, "Eminence Front." Dub-reggae K-JAH offers the Max Romeo tune Kanye West sampled for Jay-Z's "Lucifer," and rare-groove Master Sounds 98.3 connects Rob Base back to Lyn Collins' "Think (About It)." The effect is bricolage itself: You get introduced to a new act, you feel that much closer to the game, and you swoon in remembrance of the meddling narc you ran over at the mini-mart. MIKAEL WOOD

A PERFECT CIRCLE
eMOTIVe
(Virgin)

We can comfortably assume that by releasing a covers album of eclectic protest songs at the climax of a toss-up election year, this Tool side project intended to sway the GOP-leaning element of its fan base. A genius move in that APC have built a career out of paring Tool's impenetrable proto-industrial epics into easily digestible, radio-ready finger foods; hence their reach extends past Tool's into Britneyville, making them the right vehicle for such a project. Not so genius move releasing it on fucking Election Day. Much like Eminem, who dropped "Mosh" only a week before the vote, APC waited way too long to make their statement, rendering the album obsolete on arrival. A collection of mutated classics from John Lennon, Black Flag, Marvin Gaye, and more, eMOTIVe will only endure as the record that (1) really pissed off anybody who cherishes the originals (most of whom think frontman Maynard James Keenan is the most pompous 5-footer-or-so since Napoleon), and (2) turned APC's meathead disciples on to much better music. The latter ultimately justifies this horribly titled experiment. The results—shocker!—are mixed. Multi-instrumentalist Billy Howerdel Willy Wonka–izes nearly every track into a macabre merry-go-round dirge, which doesn't make Depeche Mode's "People Are People" any less overwrought but somehow gives Lennon's beloved "Imagine" a new layer of funereal depth. The hardcore cuts (Black Flag's "Gimmie Gimmie Gimmie" and Fear's "Let's Have a War") fare best, mostly because Keenan is expert at embodying the asshole in a narrative. Perhaps a rerelease with bonus tracks should be in order for 2008—the summer of 2008. ANDREW BONAZELLI

U2
How to Dismantle an Atomic Bomb
(Interscope)

Despite living in England for 10 years, it was only being in an isolated agricultural town in Canada that made me learn the value of having a "local." I'd been kicked out of so many pubs that it was easier to just give up drinking, but this is the only local venue that regularly features live music, so I'm forced to behave myself. The Sunday Night Rock Jam was sponsored by the head shop, which donated T-shirts with pictures of George W. Bush captioned "Moron." The house band played an excellent version of Celtic rocker "Hair of the Dog" (the audience sang the overlapping "son of a bitch" chorus vocal), a less-good Collective Soul song, and "Just What I Needed," in which the guitarist completely fucked up the chord sequence like he was U2's Adam Clayton. Between sets they played a Van Morrison comp featuring "Gloria," which was later the subject of single-song tribute compilations like Nuggets, Monster Movie, and Live at the Witch Trials.

U2 did a song with the same title, implying that once they reached the third chord along with the truth, they'd cover the town with red paint and rename it Hell. When "Gloria" was playing in the bar, the women would do this sex dance while they were talking. U2 may have been exploiting the nonworking classes Rattle & Hum–style by packaging the new How to Dismantle an Atomic Bomb like a Christmas record, but this one acknowledges that in 10 years, contemporary country music is going to sound like the Sick Lipstick or the Rapture, even though U2 invented the genre with their use of open (perfect fourth- or fifth-interval) chords, instead of using more disingenuous extended ones, and an unusual definition of "syncopation." "Yahweh" means "the unnameable," like when you're talking to dealers. It gets silly sometimes when you're on the phone and nobody wants to identify themselves for, like, 10 minutes. And "Bono" and "the Edge" sound like narco-pulp cop names.