Various Artists: Kill Bill Vol. 2: Kill Bill Vol. 2: Original Soundtrack

Quentin Tarantino has been justly lauded for his ability to craft images that burn and explode, but he's also as adept at matching music to pictures as any filmmaker of his generation. No track on the Kill Bill Vol. 2 soundtrack is as memorable as Tomoyasu Hotei's "Battle Without Honor Or Humanity" from Kill Bill Vol. 1, but it'd be hard to top Tarantino's most inspired and culture-penetrating scoring choice since he kicked off Pulp Fiction with Dick Dale's "Miserlou." Collectively, the two halves of Kill Bill make up a cinematic mix-tape, culled from a lifetime of grindhouse fetishism, and the soundtracks for both treat action-adventure music cues as just another set of forgotten pop fragments. The second Kill Bill soundtrack pops a little less because the movie it supports isn't as frenzied.

The Charlie Feathers psychobilly rave-up "Can't Hardly Stand It," the Johnny Cash gospel/folk ballad "A Satisfied Mind," and Shivaree's blandly exotic modern-rock concoction "Goodnight Moon" are relative oddities in a mix more geared to orchestral instrumentals with an Asian and/or Latin flavor. A lot of these are steals from other movies: Ennio Morricone lands three twangy tracks: "Il Tramonto" (from The Good, The Bad And The Ugly), "L'Arena" (from A Professional Gun), and "A Silhouette Of Doom" (from Navajo Joe), while his protégé Luis Bacalov scores the title track to Summertime Killer.

All four of the above are from movies that fuse the American Western or drive-in revenge thriller with specific cultural strains from Spain and Italy. Similarly, a lot of the best tracks on Kill Bill Vol. 2 are ethnographic mash-ups, like Lole Y Manuel's "Tu Mirá," with its children's chorus and castanets, Chingon's garage-rock nortena "Malaguena Salerosa," and Malcolm McLaren's "About Her," which makes trip-hop out of The Zombies' "She's Not There" and Bessie Smith's recording of W.C. Handy's "St. Louis Blues." It seems Tarantino's musical taste runs toward musicians as global-minded and artfully thieving as he is.