xXx: Music From and Inspired by the Motion Pictureby Various Artists

Whereas this album is divided-up into two discs, one with mostly metal and one with mostly rap, I really only have a use for about half of it (I'm mostly a rock person.) However, the parts that I *do* choose to keep are spectacular. This movie's soundtrack was one of the things that made it a pretty-damn-good movie despite being a somewhat poorly-written typical-hollywood crash-bang-boom-fest.

My favorites:

"Feuer-Frei" - The song that plays in the opening sequence of this movie. The presence of Ramms+ein definitely helped make this movie's intro into something attention-grabbing, and the song itself is very fitting and complementary to the energy of the scene and gives the character development on the villains' side a good head-start. It's a song about finding emptiness and fault in the established social order (which is totally Anarchy 99's song and dance) and consequently finding oneself as the target of scrutiny and abuse by the system. I would describe the music of the song as a frantic, audio-blitzkrieg which paints a mental picture of a dark and violent scene, maybe a lynching or other public lashing-out against a wrongly-percieved threat.

"Bodies (Vrenna's xXx-Tweaker Remix) - This remix is great. It somehow managed to take as brutal and psychotic a song as "Bodies" by Drowning Pool and make it even more tonally abusive. The song occurs during Xander Cage's intro/carjacking scene. The way it was remixed makes the already punchy rhythm feel like a sledghammer to the gut.

"I Will Be Heard" - I've said it before and I'll say it again - if you've heard one Hatebreed song, you've heard them all. It's a very basic formula: Jamie Jasta screams his lungs-out about something or other that doesn't quite require that totally berzerk level of passion, while raucous metal guitars drudge-away, alternating between palm-muted, syncopated tonal-battery and riffs where fingers slide up and down the fretboard like mud. That being said, I can deal with them for one song on an album. Hatebreed is kind of like Red Pepper. A little bit adds something a little sharper to the dish, but it's certainly not a meal all by itself.

"Millionaire" (AKA "You May Think I Ain't Worth a Dollar, But I Feel Like a Millionaire.") - This is probably the heaviest I've ever heard Queens of the Stone-Age get, and I like the song. The lyrics are kind of nonsensical (unless, I assume, you're Josh Homme) and seem to have a general theme of lavish overindulgence. I don't pay tons of attention to the lyrics in this song, though. For me, the main-attraction in this song is the guitars. I notice the words "metal-heavy, subject to code..." which is fitting of the music here. It has clear precision to its movement, however visceral.

"Get Up Again" - This is almost definitely my favorite from this album. The lyrics are very eloquent and the music crashes on you repetetively like waves. In one sense, it's a song about philanthropy. "We are the ones who aide when the going gets rough..." But on the other paw, it's also a song about social dissent, and the recognition of the diseasedness or decreptiude of certain social norms - mostly those which come from living a life of wealth so opulent that it can (and does) shelter you from experiences that would shape and strengthen you as a person, resulting in a bland, oblivious quality of personhood.

I think I'm running out of room here, but I'd also recommend all the other songs on the "Heavy Metal Side" of this album.