ELECTRIC JESUS: Original Soundtrack
Original Soundtrack Electric Jesus (Joyful Noise)
If there have yet been any movies with their action centered around goings-on within the 1960’s-’70’s Jesus hippie movement , they haven’t made any great cultural impression. Hippies are colorful-and fraught-enough to lend themselves to cinematic rendering, and the added wrinkle of flower children committed to the Maker of the flora they wear, and everything else, could only added add opportunities for compelling characterizations.
The Christian metal scene of the 1980’s was neither the focus of the generous and generally favorable mass media attention as the Jesus people of a generation earlier nor-though only the Lord knows this for certain-its widespread spiritual revival. It did, however, provide the next intersection of true faith and music familiar to a significant portion of the general public, just as the Jesus revolution prior supplied much of impetus and infrastructure of whatever is left of contemporary Christian music and business to the current day.
Enter Electric Jesus, director Chris White’s 2020 comedic homage to a fictional teenage ’80’s Christian glam metal band. The movie started playing the festival circuit last year, awaiting general theatrical release, but its music can be heard and purchased now.
Old school headbangers will want in on this soundtrack for its faithful recreations of ’80’s hair metal. The chuckles to be had from the tunes by the group on whom the movie’s action is focused, 316 (like anyone has to tell you it should be pronounced “three-sixteen”?!), land somewhere between Spinal Tap’s knowing stupidity and The Darkness’ slightly more nuanced wit. The film’s most recurrent leitmotif derives from “Commandos for Christ,” a monstrously hooky, deliberately theologically goofy anthem that could be the best single a converted Ratt never recorded. But a few other gems abide within the album’s grooves, including a God-and-girlfriend power ballad that could initiate a run on Bic lighters at convenience stores near whatever arenas it would be played.
What may surprise some is that all those metallic flashbacks, including those attributed to the film’s Satanic bands acting as 316’s nemeses, is the musician responsible for them. Daniel Smith, known to indie rock aficionados for the freaky folkiness of acts including Danielson and Danielson Familie, went back to the time in his life before Sonic Youth realigned his aesthetic sensibilities, to plumb his appreciation for Twisted Sister and the type of ensembles that would play Gazzarri’s on Sunset Strip during the Reagan years. And the sort of falsetto howls emitted by Smith in his bands and those of the Aqua Net set depicted in Electric Jesus aren’t so far apart as they may first sound, really.
And like moststruggling new bands, 316 played cover, too. Here they assay one by the group they aspire to rival in popularity, Stryper, and another whom the guys may have seen in one of their few times MTV played their videos, Rez. Both are more than respectable, as are Smith’s interludes of more traditional soundtrack music, a hymnodic replication of ’80’s video game music and what sounds like his takes on Children of the Day-styled blissfulness. Somewhere afield from that is Smith joining energetic alt rock forces with Steve Taylor and the rest of The Danielson Foil for that band’s first appearance since 2016’s Wow To The Liveness.
What’s left of the 21-track are a strangely limp,. mantric ditty attributed to Joy Explosion, a cowpunk rave-up of a country gospel standard by actress Sarah Wember backed by 316 and, the furthest stylistic outlier here?, Fleming & John giving gentle acoustic strums and sweetly mournful vocalizing to a Patty Loveless late ’80’s country radio hit.
Here’s assuming that last one makes sense in the context of the movie. And here’s trusting this soundtrack complements a cinematic experience respectful of its spiritual underpinnings and funny whether its viewers experienced the milieu in which it’s based.
-Jamie Lee Rake
About Author
