ost of the people I know who saw this upon its 2004 UK release stumbled across the film due to burgeoning admirations for actor Paddy Considine (you can see him shine in Dead Man’s Shoes or the otherwise crap Cinderella Man) and were thoroughly impressed with almost everything about My Summer of Love. Sadly, it’s probably more well-known for a strand of plot involving a lesbian relationship, receiving the unnecessary lurid ‘shock horror young lesbian’ press in the tabloids.

I recalled the soundtrack to this Yorkshire Dales' summer tale of fixation, unhappiness, and claustrophobia as being a bit dark, featuring, alongside the original work of Goldfrapp and Will Gregory, some famous classical works. Unfortunately this album release squanders the excellent work done by Goldfrapp and the film’s director Pawel Pawlikowski and stands as a contender in the newly created league of the most cobbled together soundtrack release since Ghostbusters II.

Goldfrapp’s “Lovely Head” provides the film’s central theme (and spawns several of this album’s other instrumental tracks) and first track here. Perfectly capturing the heady daydreamy feel of the film’s lazy days that slip between escape from life’s daily pressures and the boredom of day-to-day living, the cinematic echoing whistle and Alison Goldfrapp’s chanteuse style perfectly handles the lounge musical backing before it’s occasionally shattered by a sound that evokes a screeching guitar, a high Goldfrapp vocal, or some Theremin—or maybe a mixture of all three. This damaged sound captures the intrusion of real life and shatters the calm descending into mild deformation at its end. This song is then cannibalised to differing extents in five other ‘mood’ pieces on the LP that make it warmer or darker, depending on the mood of the scene. They all work brilliantly but are edited to shockingly short lengths, rendering them nothing more than glimpses, the music that was so powerful and significant in the film has been made almost incidental to the OST.

The album appears keen to point out that two of the ‘real’ songs on this release are not in the film at all and claims that two others do “not appear in film” in the format heard here. The two songs tacked onto the movie OST by the compilers, “I Go To Sleep” by The Pretenders and “Elephant Woman” by Blonde Redhead, manage to sum up images of female longing which is, I suppose fairly appropriate, although they’re too tender to really capture the emotions of the two lead actresses. The album’s orchestral pieces (Mozart and “The Swan (Adagio)”) are unceremoniously shoved into its second half and sound too grand and lost within the structure to work well, while later tracks like Edith Piaf’s “La Foule” and Gilberto Gil’s “Três Caravelas” articulately bring back specific scenes.

The only real positive in this lazy release is that it might help to publicise My Summer of Love, but rest assured you’ll enjoy the film a whole lot more.