"Until The End of the World" Soundtrack - Unacknowledged Classic?

or, gear and mitya otm.

at the risk of xpost, Songs from the Cool World = another seminal contemporary soundtrack for me.

Skeletal, moody, pretty...after Violator's world-conquering stomp it was a Martin ballad that sounded near unlike anything he had done beforehand, a killer vocal performance out and out. A dark jewel.

not in the US/UK, but the german edition is readily available and totally worth it for the FIVE HOUR DIRECTOR'S CUT.

i would drop "death's door" to make room for "blood of eden" because the scene featuring "blood of eden" is so gorgeous and crucial.

I had a tape of the soundtrack, and liked it without loving it. Haven't heard it since the early nineties.

Brushed drums and stand-up bass sound great when they use'em , no?

I finally got around to seeing the longer cut and it's significantly better. It actually feels like a Wenders movie, especially in the first half which is some of the greatest futurist Eurotrash ever - up there with William Gibson's Pattern Recognition. Too bad Solveig Dommartin is so intolerable.

The grave yawns for us all.

Yes! Lord only knows what rights considerations etc were involved, but not including it just doesn't make sense.

And even without seeing it, I wholeheartedly agree that the 5-hour cut is much, much better than what I saw in US release, which was precisely two half-movies stitched together.

my dad used to listen to this all the time when i was a kid, so its got a lot of sentimental value for me, but, damn, i love this sdtrk

busted this out after reading that the bands were instructed to write songs that sounded like songs would in 1999--interesting exercise both from the bands pov and from the listeners: did dm really think that they would be writing songs like 'deaths door' ten years later? 'sax and violins' meanwhile just sounds like a TH b-side (tho its probably the last good song they ever wrote). love the lanois track.

how old are you??

60

I love this soundtrack too. It was my favorite cd to fall asleep to for a while in the early-mid 90s.

i just listened to the whole thing all the way fhrough a few nights ago. maybe for the first time. it's wonderful

the julee cruise song is nice

this movie made a big impact on me @ age 13, but now i suspect i wouldn't like it at all

Did anyone ever watch that 5-hour version that came out in Europe long after the fact? Always been curious but don't have anything to play the discs on if I imported them.

Think I commented on the 5-hr version upthread. The long version is a better movie, but Dommartin is still the weakest part.

did dm really think that they would be writing songs like 'deaths door' ten years later?

The world weeps.

Thanks - I skimmed and missed it. Donmartin was pretty bad in the three-hour cut, so more of her probably isn't a plus. Shame really, because she was just about perfect in Wings of Desire. Guess the high living was taking its toll by then.

If anything, rent the DVD and watch it up until when everybody arrives in Australia. The first hour or so when everyone and everything is atemporal and ripped off from imagined Godard movies is great stuff.

Wenders looks back on UTEOTW 20 years later. Also, he loves the Lou Reed/Metallica album.

My dream is that he releases a Blu-Ray version that is 10 or 13 hours long. Even the 5-hour director's cut isn't long enough.

And I have come around, somewhat, on "Death's Door."

There's got to be a good HD version of the 5 hour cut floating around on BT. I actually liked the short version I saw at the time, but would love to see if the director's cut would hold a candle to Wings Of Desire.

I wish I would have made more of an effort to get into this album. At the time I think I was in middle school and the local library got a copy of this on cassette. I was a big fan of the Talking Heads and Lou Reed tracks, but I probably would have benefited from a CD where I could skip around. Some of the songs felt pretty challenging to me back then, so I didn't bother dubbing a copy when I took it back.

"whispering, as i was driving, quietly the car was rollin' like a bullet. "

I was checking the Modern Rock charts on Wikipedia and noticed two songs from this soundtrack were Modern Rock number 1s back to back.

Man, I was just googling around and read for the first time that "Until the End of the World" is apparently about a conversation between Jesus and Judas. Now, I get that U2 frequently operates in the realm of gospel and soul and Christian rock in general, with camouflaged Christianity, but I was disappointed to learn its straight from the Bible origins. I kind of liked the role it served in the album's implicit narrative of a relationship falling apart. Oh well. That'll teach me to google.

the Bible's cool though

Criterion edition of Until the End of the World now available... there's a 15-minute documentary about the soundtrack recorded in 2019 with two fun facts:

1. Wim Wenders made himself a special coat with giant interior pockets when he was young so he could steal records
2. Blood of Eden was left off the soundtrack because the record company was pissed that Peter Gabriel wrote a song for Wenders but hadn't turned in his new album yet

I checked out the Neneh Cherry dub recently, to see if it was still the proto–trip-hop track that blew my mind in high school... sadly, it didn’t sound as cool today as it did then.

the non-dub version of Move With Me still sounds pretty great, especially in the car!

10 o’clock , night time in New York

this town full of men with big mouths and no guts

One of Daniel Lanois's better songs, one of U2's better songs.

whispering
as i was driving
quietly the car was rolling like a bullet

also i think 'days' is EC's best cover?

he was so *busy* at that time, but reined it in enough for this