While it’s been a few years since we’ve heard a new record from The Cure or Yeah Yeah Yeahs, both bands’ respective singers have kept busy with one-off solo cuts in the meantime. Now director Tim Burton has recruited Karen O and Robert Smith to contribute material for the new feature-length remake of his own 1984 short, Frankenweenie.
Dubbed Frankenweenie Unleashed!, the soundtrack features Smith’s second collaboration with Burton, following up a cover of “Very Good Advice” he recorded for 2010’s Alice in Wonderland with an original song titled “Witchcraft.” For O, it’s her first chance to work with the man who “shaped my artistic sensibility over the past 20 years alongside thousands of other impressionable offbeat youths,” she told Rolling Stone last week. “Tim wanted an unconventional unconditional love song.” Drawing inspiration from B-movie fright flicks and those great Harry Belafonte-scored scenes in Burton’s Beetlejuice, she “went in the direction of exotica and calypso” for closing credits tune “Strange Love.”
Meanwhile, Beetlejuice/Edward Scissorhands star Winona Ryder not only reteamed with the director for the role of Elsa van Helsing, she performs the soundtrack cut “Praise Be New Holland” as well. Add that to the Flaming Lips joining Grace Potter for “My Mechanical Friend” to the list and it looks like one of the more promising OSTs of the year is on the way this fall. Preview the tracklist and trailer below:
Frankenweenie Unleashed! Soundtrack List
01. Karen O | Strange Love
02. Neon Trees | Electric Heart (Stay Forever)
03. Mark Foster | Polartropic (You Don’t Understand Me)
04. Passion Pit | Almost There
05. Plain White T’s | Pet Sematary
06. Kimbra | With My Hands
07. AWOLNATION | Everybody’s Got a Secret
08. Kerli | Immortal
09. Grace Potter w/ the Flaming Lips | My Mechanical Friend
10. Imagine Dragons | Lost Cause
11. Grouplove | Underground
12. Skylar Grey | Building a Monster
13. Robert Smith | Witchcraft
14. Winona Ryder | Praise Be New Holland