4 out of 5

Produced by: Dave Sardy

Label: Madison Gate Records (digital)

Lest you forgot, or – for shame – never knew, Dave Sardy rocks.  And on his newest album, Premium Rush, he proves that once again, with…  Ah, wait, this is a soundtrack?

You might’ve missed when Premium Rush came out.  While it was moderately received, it didn’t quite make its budget back, and I recall it disappearing pretty quickly in a movie market that tends to demand more clear award bait, genre work, or special effects blockbusters.  For me, it was more notable for seeming like a remake of a book – called The Ultimate Rush, by Joe Quirk – and I’m still incredibly puzzled as to why Quirk’s lawsuit against the film was eventually dismissed.  I mean, I haven’t seen the film, so maybe my ‘incredible puzzlement’ is more, eh, incredulous.  But: what I can say from the summary, from the title, and from this “score” is that it’s an always-on movie, rather fitting for a dude like Sardy who likes his rockin’ out to be always-on as well.  Alas, that style doesn’t make for the greatest movie scores.

I first noticed Sardy’s hand at production on Skeleton Key, then followed him to Barkmarket and fell madly in love.  Everything he’s touched is, if not gold, worthwhile in some fashion.  When he moved into film scores, something I’d gotten more in to at the time, I was psyched, as he’d been out of the make-yer-own-music realm for quite a while, but even my totally biased ears could sense that his love for a riff didn’t quite translate to movie themes.  He chose flicks (or was asked to score flicks) that relatively aligned with that preference, but still, I can say it: his scores often lack resonance.  It makes you wish they were albums and not soundtracks.

And Premium Rush fits that bill moreso than ever before.  There’s the slightest hint of a theme in opener ‘This Is My Bike’ and appearing sporadically thereafter, but this disc could almost absolutely pass as a new band’s instrumental outing – something like the Oxes 3-minute blasts of rock simplicity – and you’d just be checking to see when they might be playing live near you.  Yeah, this fulfills a missing Sardy component in my life, in which his keen ear for raw but clean production brings the rootsiest riffs right up to your eardrums and then soothes them with lovely bass grooves, grounding drum beats, and occasional little snippets of keys, strings, and other manipulations.  ‘Premium Rush’ is a chase flick, and the rush is here, only pausing for the few minutes of, like, reflective plot moments on the latter parts of ‘Chinatown Auto Destruct’ or ‘Nima, Pt. 1 & 2,’ and these are also the cuts on the disc that make you realize that Sardy is following a movie script to guide tone and not the whims of an album’s sequencing.  (Sure, the frequent thirty second cuts might hint at that, too, but they flow together pretty well.)

But otherwise, no: I can’t ‘picture’ the movie this score goes along to, though I can accept that it works well moment to moment.  That aside, Dave Sardy freakin’ still rocks, and while his lovely growl is missing, and the metal heft of Barkmarket ain’t there, the tracks on Premium Rush feature some of the catchiest, grooviest riffs he’s put together, and make for a pretty great instrumental album.