Suicide Squad: The Album // Various Artists

Suicide Squad: The Album (2016)

John Ostrander began publishing the modern Suicide Squad series in May 1987, two months after Ronald Reagan broadcast his fatherly confusion about all that money sent to Nicaragua’s Contras. Gathering second-rate supervillains for a covert-ops team was both a reaction to the cynical politics of the era and an editorial necessity—you can show Captain Boomerang committing atrocities Batman never could. Movie soundtracks often feel similarly calculated: Some antiheroes get coerced into serving their government, and others form an unlikely partnership for the Spawn OST. You have an excuse to bury your worst material, or an opportunity to reconsider it. Following in the tradition of Judgment Night and Blade II, the Suicide Squad album tries to bring musical strangers to happy disagreement.

The affection holds, for a moment. If Skrillex had a secret origin, it would probably involve rock, techno, and rap pooling in mutant coils at some point during the late ’90s, so pairing him up with Rick Ross for “Purple Lamborghini” is almost intuitive. And Ross sounds more energetic than he has in a while, the bass clawing down to his lowest frequencies. “Sucker for Pain” is credited to “Lil Wayne, Wiz Khalifa & Imagine Dragons w/Logic & Ty Dolla $ign ft. X Ambassadors,” a gloriously generic pileup of royalty negotiations featuring Dragon man Dan Reynolds moaning: “I wanna chain you up, I wanna tie you down/I’m a slave to your game.” That’s just called being a switch.

The best contributions here go to approximate extremes. The R&B singer Kehlani delivers lyrics as measured intimacies, and on “Gangsta” her voice slows to a mantra: “You got me hanging from the ceiling,” her high notes sounding both captivated and frustrated. With its whispered taunts, its guitars testing the constant drum machine like a blade, “Medieval Warfare” is Grimes’ most direct attempt to salvage the aesthetic of nu-metal. Panic! at the Disco’s Brendon Urie has the voice to bring off “Bohemian Rhapsody,” but that also encourages their cover’s reference (for a moment I wondered whether the backing vocals were sampled from the original). The pleasure of “Bohemian Rhapsody” is its indifference to anybody else’s notions of taste, brandishing worthy historical references as preposterous camp, giving the metalheads pseudo-opera. Meticulously recreating that feels somewhat misguided, like annotating a joke.

According to anonymous-but-entertaining reports, Warner executives panicked after the first Suicide Squad teaser blew up online—instead of that hyper-saturated splatter, the actual film consisted of interchangeable paramilitary types looking drab in the rain. They hired back the trailer company to help with a different parallel cut, using familiar music cues to staple the final hybrid together. Listening to the Suicide Squad soundtrack resembles that experience, minus most of the hits. What you find is portentous covers, gun effects borrowed from a Joker toy, and Twenty One Pilots, a band whose singer addresses the microphone like his loyal pet rat. They don’t even rise from irritating to villainous unless you have the misfortune of programming a modern-rock radio station.

The presence of Eminem’s “Without Me” is telling: Once a wrecker of civilization, now the bully who couldn’t even go after ‘NSync collectively. Suicide Squad wants to show you around its twisted mind so badly you would think the mortgage just defaulted. The earlier Batman films reckoned with far more vivid forms of ugliness, whether the brutalist pandemonium that Tim Burton and Anton Furst devised or Joel Schumacher’s daubs of neon, but then they also had reference points beyond existing nerd media. (And Batman Forever had “Kiss From a Rose.”) The new superhero universe is a cosmos of templates, endlessly elaborating on itself—which makes a soundtrack like Suicide Squad like the background music in a PowerPoint.