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Music is an essential element of Edgar Wright's Baby Driver, a movie about a getaway driver who races away from crimes with his iPod pumping. Fittingly, the film receives an expertly curated soundtrack — one that lasts an hour and 42 minutes, which is just ten minutes shorter than the film itself. Such a long running time allows the curators to flash their good taste and skills in crate digging.

Baby Driver is anchored by a few crowd-pleasers from several different styles and decades — the Damned's "Neat Neat Neat" bounces up against the Commodores' "Easy," Queen's "Brighton Rock" rears its head, as does the Simon & Garfunkel song that provides the film with its title — but individual songs aren't the point of Baby Driver: what matters is the journey, and this swift race through soul, jazz, rock, and pop offers an incredible ride. Sometimes its sensibility seems a bit rooted in the swinging '90s — that's the era when mixing up easy listening exotica with Northern soul and obscure rock codified as enduringly hip — but the music here is good enough to obliterate any aesthetic objections. Plus, the producers have fun with juxtapositions, placing T. Rex's "Debora" next to Beck's "Debra," letting Googie Rene's dancefloor groover "Smokey Joe's La La" glide into the Beach Boys' "Let's Go Away for Awhile," and switching gears from Brenda Holloway's "Every Little Bit Hurts" into Blur's frenetic "Intermission."

From its song selection to its sequencing, Baby Driver is a tour de force of record geekdom and one hell of a good time. — (via All Music)

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The soundtrack for the film comprises of 27 songs from covers everything from Queen to the Commodores, it flows through the movie akin to a musical and it isn’t like the film adds the music overtop, it is part of the chemistry of the film. The flow is amazing and keeps your foot tapping through the entire film.

One of the parts that seem to make me feel awkward is the way that the music is seemingly both diegetic and non-diegetic in the film. Diegetic means that the music is natural to the film, the characters will hear the music as well as we the audience. Non-diegetic means that only we the audience will hear it but the characters do not. There is seemingly a hybridity between these 2. At times the volume will make you know it is coming from the headphones of our main character Baby’s iPod. The audio never seemingly makes the obvious leap between the two worlds and just sits in a happy medium. While it is not bad, it allows for this feeling that is absurd for me but allows for the world of the movie have this constant push forward that is exciting.

Every track is seemingly random but also works together in a symphonic way, Wright describes it as putting your iTunes on shuffle and seeing what randomly comes up. I’m a fan of doing this when I have friends over and just to see what contrasts and comparison arise through the magic of the iTunes algorithm makes for many new discoveries of songs that you never knew would work together but totally do. They are all curated to both tell a story for the characters while still being logical that this character would have all of these songs on his iPod. You can see the passion for music as a craft throughout the film and Wright’s passion flows through. It is seemingly the epidemy of all of his work from his early TV show Spaced to the raucous highs of Scott Pilgrim vs. The World and the kineticism of Shaun of the Dead. It is both the same and very different from anything he has done before. — (via Studio Two Seven)

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Label: 30th Century Records // Columbia // Sony Music
Format: 2 x Vinyl, LP, Compilation
Released: 2017
Genre: Rock, Funk / Soul, Blues, Stage & Screen
Style: Soundtrack

File under: Soundtrack
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