Digga Digga Dog Oren Waters; Cruella, What Can a Bird Do?, The
Language of Dogs, I'm Getting' Good at Being Bad, written by Mike Himelstein
& Marco Marinangeli; Puppy Love Myra; Cruella De Vil 2000
Camara Kambon; My Spot in the World Lauren Christy; Bella
Notte (from Lady and the Tramp - Tony & Joe, written by
Sonny Burke and Peggy Lee); So Fabulous, So Fierce (Freak Out)
Thunderpuss featuring Jocelyn Enriquez; Whatcha Gonna Do (With Your Second
Chance) Nobody's Angel
Strange as it may seem, there was a time when the purpose of a soundtrack
album was to present for those people who wanted it, the music written for
a film. Such a ridiculously old fashioned concept has no place here. You
will find not one note of David Newman's score on this disc. Dodie Smith,
meanwhile, must be approaching lightspeed in her grave.
Smith, of course, wrote her own excellent sequel to 101 Dalmatians, The
Starlight Barking (1967). But just as Disney have ignored that book
in favour of a lazy rehash of their own 1996 second film of the original
novel, so this 'music from and inspired by' album has nothing to do with
the genteel and whimsical Englishness of Smith's fictional worlds. Rather
it is filled with unlistenable rap and lightweight American pop, all utterly
lacking in any inspiration from anything other than a bank account.
Of the 11 tracks on this brief album five seem to have been written for the
film. Cruella De Vil 2000 is a jazz funk number which is probably
heard over the end title. The other four are all written by Mike Himelstein
and Marco Marinangeli. Two of these, Cruella and I'm Getting'
Good at Being Bad feature Susanne Blakeslee in mediocre big band vamp
numbers as the villainous Cruella De Vil. The material is so thin all Blakeslee
can do is camp things up to a ridiculous degree of self-parody. What
Can a Bird Do?, finds Jeff Bennett attempting to ape Eric Idle in a
sub-Python comedy song with every cliché from the Eric Idle book of
1970's comedy songs. The Language of Dogs is a blues sung by Randy
Crenshaw, and faint compliment, is the best of the four. It all makes one
wish for the halcyon days of Lady and the Tramp, from which Bella
Notte is extracted, confirming the mediocrity of everything else on
the album. Completing the feeling that this is really one extended advert
is a CD-ROM trailer. The plastic airbrushed face of Glenn Close on the cover
is simply freakish. In a word, appalling.
Gary S. Dalkin
Various 
