Various: Music From Vanilla Sky

By RUSSELL BAILLIE

(Herald rating: * * * )

We're not too hot on the film itself but at least — as would be expected of a film by former music scribe Cameron Crowe — the soundtrack has its moments.

Among them are R. E. M.'s exuberant opening track All The Right Friends (an early song re-recorded for the occasion) and their glorious Sweetness Follows; Paul McCartney's title track is a likeable nonsense, though if Cameron Diaz's film song I Fall Apart isn't the start of a new career in Garbage-like pop, it's not down to her Debbie Harry-like singing.

Elsewhere Crowe raids his record collection to revive the Monkees' Porpoise Song (the theme to their film Head), Todd Rundgren's Can We Still Be Friends, Peter Gabriel's Solsbury Hill and Bob Dylan's Fourth Time Around. Add a smattering of modern electronic acts (Looper, Leftfield, the Chemical Brothers) as well as Radiohead's Everything In Its Right Place and Sigur Ros' equally unsettling svefn-g-enlar and the result is a diverse soundtrack that succeeds in being more profound and intriguing than the movie.

Label: Reprise