Grease

Grease - 3
Summer Nights - 4
Hopelessly Devoted To You - 3
You're The One That I Want - 4
Sandy - 3
Beauty School Drop-Out - 4
Look At Me, I'm Sandra Dee - 3
Greased Lightning - 4
It's Raining On Prom Night - 3
Alone At The Drive-In Movie - 3
Blue Moon - 3
Rock 'N Roll Is Here To Stay - 3
Those Magic Changes - 3
Hound Dog - 4
Born To Hand Jive - 3
Tears On My Pillow - 3
Mooning - 3
Freddy My Love - 3
Rock 'N Roll Party Queen - 2
There Are Worse Things I Could Do - 3
Look At Me, I'm Sandra Dee (Reprise) - 3
We Go Together - 3
Love Is A Many Splendored Thing - 3
Grease (reprise) - 3
Total - 76 stars / 24 tracks = 3.17 stars

I would like to begin by letting you know how awkward it was to be me listening to this album. My fiancee and I recently moved into an apartment that isn't exactly in the most respectable part of the city. One tries to not bring attention to oneself. One fails to do this however, when one is holding onto a re-usable that until now one had not realized was covered in buttons with Robert Pattinson's face on them, while one's iPod shows that one is listening to the Grease soundtrack. Moving on.

If you've seen the movie, and even if you haven't, many of these songs are engrained into your memory. "Summer Nights" in particular, is such a mainstay of karaoke, weddings, and retail radio, that it is inescapable. I also kind of like it, although I don't know how much of that is due to its saturation into my pores from my exposure to it. The same goes for "You're The One That I Want" and "Greased Lightning."

"Beauty School Drop-Out" is probably my favourite song on the album. It's cleverly written, competently performed, without any of the increasingly irritating flashiness of some of the movie's more memorable tracks.

About a third of the album is handed over to Sha-Na-Na, who provided the music for the film's prom scene. In it, they dutifully perform a smattering of 50's era doo-wop songs. They don't do much with the music, and why would they, performing at a high school? Their "Hound Dog" is good because "Hound Dog" is good. I also loved the bass part in "Blue Moon" (after about three minutes of research, my best guess about the vocalist is that it's Jim Bauman).

There are also some songs on the album that don't exist in the movie. I presume that they exist from the original stage musical, but I couldn't be bothered to find out. Their general okay-ness and focus on secondary characters go a long way to explaining why they didn't make the cut.

Generally, this album is one that is going to be treasured by those who love the film, blasted by those who hated it, and met with casual indifference by the rest of us.