Unlike
the Beatles,
Michael Jackson’s body of work lends itself to the kind of glitzy mash-up soundtrack
Cirque du Soleil requires -- which is a roundabout way of saying the soundtrack to their 2011 production
Immortal feels a little sounder than
the Beatles'
LOVE. Of course,
LOVE is by far a more ambitious work, creating new songs out of old samples, whereas
Immortal is unabashed Vegas glitz, songs truncated or elongated to the demands of the stage, audio drops of music videos or interviews triple underscoring already apparent sentiment. Producer
Kevin Antunes never recontextualizes the original recordings; he favors hits-on-parade medleys, letting the hooks -- the melodies, the rhythms -- sink in before moving on to the next snippet. Perhaps it shouldn’t be surprising that roughly half of the album is devoted to music made after
Bad: after he parted ways with
Quincy Jones,
Jackson flitted between attempts to reconcile with hip-hop and old-fashioned showbiz. Here, the latter overwhelms, bending all the disco and dance to its sensibility, and if it is frankly unnecessary as an album -- why listen to this when there are plenty of hits available? -- it’s an effective soundtrack for a lavish, expensive dance production.