When it comes to sonic slivers of feelgood, 2016 has been made that little bit better by Justin Timberlake's Can't Stop the Feeling!, a song that sounds like buried treasure from better, simpler times.
Written specifically for Trolls (that's the Oscar sorted, then) it's so good that it features twice on the soundtrack: the original version and another all-star movie singalong with the man himself, Gwen Stefani, James Corden, Anna Kendrick and more.
So, the rest of the album has its work cut out and, predictably, nothing else comes close to those four minutes of magic.
The presence of Timberlake in the recording studio as executive producer suggested something truly special here but Trolls (the record) is a letdown. It's way too short (37 minutes!), has a far-from-fantastic team-up with Stefani and is over-reliant on covers of classics that, while pleasant, need the visuals to really work. Bizarrely, you only get snippets of The Sound of Silence, Hello and I'm Coming Out/Mo' Money Mo' Problems. Is there some law against having the full versions? It's not like Kendrick and Zooey Deschanel can't hold a tune.
Timberlake joins the former for True Colors but he can't mine the oddball heartache of the original - again, the track features twice. Maybe they should've included The Four Tops' It's the Same Old Song too...
Hang on to your money for the movie.
Harry Guerin
