By Christopher Lennertz & VA

Amazon

Lennertz, probably otherwise best known for scoring Alvin And The Chipmunks and the WB’s Supernatural, returns for a third season scoring Amazon’s The Boys, and as you might expect it follows in the tone of the scores for the previous seasons, only more so.

This soundtrack release brings us a mix of Lennertz’s score, specially-written and performed satirical songs from the season, and a couple of cover version tracks that popped up in various episodes. The licenced songs are the sparsest element of the album, with only cover versions of “License To Drive” and “Dream A Little Dream Of Me,” in among the new songs such as the sublime “Chimps Don’t Cry” and “America’s Son” from Laurie Holden, in character.  “America’s Son” in particular catches an incredible satirical slot between sounding like a prog-rock Christmas take from the 1970s, and a Reagan or Bush era propagandist power ballad. Much kudos to Laurie Holden on that one. We also get an in-character cover of Dream A Little Dream Of Me from Karen Fukuhara, and “Rock My Kiss” and “You’ve Got A Licence To Drive” from Miles Gaston Villanueva, both of which are pretty good.

Sadly we don’t get to hear any of the period classics used in the show, such as Billy Joel’s “Uptown Girl” or Elton’s “Goodbye Yellow Brick Road” let alone the Kinks, Britney Spears, Scorpions, or Doris Day tracks (to name but a few) used in the show – but none of them are hard to find in general compilations or online.

The album opens with the very Thrashy (I mean thrash-metal-like, it’s not a typo) “Not Ready” and then proceeds to give us a fairly normal kind of percussive dark action show score, interspersed with some of  those really amusing songs mentioned above. Lennertz’s score runs the gamut from thrash, percussion, and some reasonable emotional beats, but there are few real standouts. Few, but not none; “Soldier Boy” is an amusingly spot-on pastiche of 80s action that provides a great instrumental companion piece to the “America’s Son” song, while “#Homelight” is, if you can imagine it and imagine it’s a good thing, because it is, best described as the most awesome SUV commercial music ever. You can just see SUVs doing their stunty stuff in exotic locations.

Verdict: Overall, it’s not a bad soundtrack, it’s not the greatest either, but it’s of a level of quality you’d expect from a major streaming show these days, and has a selection of good songs mixed in. Fun, especially if you’re a fan of the show, though if you are, then that’s when you might be disappointed by the leaving out of so many songs. 8/10

David A McIntee