Mondo: The Art of Soundtracks Book Review

Video Review

The Art of Soundtracks Review

A must have collector’s item for the vinyl soundtrack enthusiast. The Art of Soundtracks is a glorious collection of nearly a decade of imaginative unique artwork created for special vinyl releases of some of the most iconic film, television and video game soundtracks of all time.

The Contents of the Book

The book kicks off with a nice Foreward by Academy Award winning composer Michael Giacchino with a Preface and Introduction by Mo Shafeek and Spencer HIckman, the two co-creative directors at Mondo and Death Waltz Recording Co. It also includes a brief overview of Mondo by film critic and journalist Todd Gilchrist.

In the Foreward Giacchino reminisces about his youth and his experience of listening to records and how that experience impacted him. Records truly mean a lot to music enthusiasts and often simple albums end up having much greater impact on us than we realize. I particularly agreed with how the art of records would bring you back to that cinema experience.

The introduction from the creative tag team provides a great background history of the record label and how it evolved into what it is today. For the casual and hardcore fan it’s always nice to know a little bit of the behind the scenes stories that helped to shape the company.

The Specs

This book measures in at 12” in a square format and blends well into your record collection. Truthfully, and being ultra ultra nit-picky I would love if it extended just slightly beyond 12” so that it would be the same height as a record jacket and seamlessly disappear amongst my record collection. That is however unreasonable to expect though as a 12x12 format is more of a standard in the printing world and expanding beyond that would surely increase the cost unnecessarily.

This could potentially be resolved if they considered adding a slipcase to the book. Not only would it beef it up in size to make it feel more like one of their box sets, but it would also protect the book. You can see in the photo above my book endured some kind of impact that compressed the spine. Not a big deal for me, but I saw similar damage to other books in Amazon reviews. Some people might be more upset about that sort of thing. But to be fair, Amazon shipping tends to be rougher as opposed to ordering directly from Mondo who typically have rock solid packaging.

The Artwork

It features over 90 pieces of artwork from Mondo’s archive and is 216 pages. It includes some of their most iconic releases highlighting front jacket designs, gatefold designs and unique vinyl record colorways/variants that they have produced.

The book has stellar art direction that keeps the book engaging with a mixture of page spread designs. Depending on the release featured, some records have a little bit more content and show off more of the artwork while others might have just a front cover image. The artwork chosen is curated well and presented nicely in the book.

Most of the images of the front cover have a white border around them. This is one choice that I internally debate if I like. On the one hand it has a premium “art print” feel, while conversely if all these covers had a full page bleed it might feel more like you have the cover in your hands. You definitely get this feel with the full bleed 2 page spreads that beautifully showcase some of the iconic gatefold designs.

Art Index

Another thing I love about the art direction is it lets the artwork speak for itself. It doesn’t clutter up pages with titles and descriptions. However for those stumped about some releases and wanting to see more there is a handy art index at the back of the book.

Who is this Book for?

Mondo is extremely appealing to a large group of vinyl and movie fans. Like all artwork, your appreciation of their artwork will be extremely subjective. There are loads of vinyl soundtrack fans who prefer the traditional artwork associated with the film, the classic movie poster style covers and thus may not be a fan of Mondo’s work. If that’s you, this book is not for you.

Mondo and Death Waltz have developed a cult-following for their imaginative and creative artwork and have really captured the imagination of a lot of movie fans. So often they find the essence of a film and distill that into an interesting piece of artwork that speaks to die-hard fans.

Remember the time they designed the Fight Club cover so you had to rip it open and destroy it?

What’s great about the extensive collection of work featured in the book is it showcases the various styles from Mondo’s stable of artists. You may not like a couple of the releases, but with so many styles surely there are some pieces that should appeal to everyone.

You don’t even necessarily have to love vinyl to enjoy this book. A movie buff could certainly appreciate the artwork created for a film or franchise they love and even appreciate the subtle winks and nods of the references with the colorways designed. Liquid filled acid blood! Come on! That is damn cool. (And sadly one of my sought after grails that I haven’t been able to get)

A great question to consider is if you own a majority of these releases, does this book make sense to get? I would still answer yes. The experience of holding the book in your hands and flipping through this archive of artwork is different than pulling out records one by one. It’s nice to be able to flip through a history of record releases all in one.

The Ones That Got Away

To me, the biggest reason to get this book is to have just a piece of a highly sought after record that slipped away from your grasp. We’ve all been there, we’ve all missed a release we really wanted. This book is a nice way of owning a piece of that release in some way. Or for some… a horrible reminder of what is missing. It just depends if you’re a glass is half full kind of person.

What’s Missing? A lot!

I’m a selfish man. I want it all. But yet again that is an unrealistic expectation. There are many Mondo releases not featured in the book. There could be a number of reasons for that.

Firstly, you simply can’t have everything otherwise the book would be a bit bloated and likely unaffordable. The book as-is, is a very good length and feels satisfactory. The dissatisfaction comes in when you think of a specific release you love and think “hey, I wonder why that’s not in the book”.

Secondly, there are some hints at a Volume 2. The way the book is curated it doesn’t just include all of the best and most popular, leaving some really strong material available for a future edition. Some recent popular releases including The Avengers Box Set, Tron, Solo, the first Back to the Future Boxset and many others are not present in the book.

What I Would Like to See In VOL.2

Something that would be cool to see in a future edition would be more of the vinyl variants. For example the Jurassic Park Soundtrack has had numerous different versions and I would love to see them all. In fact I would be okay with some repetition of this book by showing more of the colorways they have designed for artwork already featured in this book. They truly have some stunning looking records. Colored records aren’t for everyone, but for those who dig them, Mondo releases some gems!

Also there are some really cool inserts that are absent from the book. Over the years there have been some very clever and unique inserts. One cool one for Mission Impossible Fallout was a paper record. I would love to see other examples of creative inserts that I wouldn’t know about from other albums.

Conclusion

This is an easy recommendation. If you love movies, soundtracks and vinyl… this book is for you. A must have in your collection and a definite conversation piece if you have movie nerd friends visiting your house.

Check it out on Amazon US

Check it out on Amazon Canada