Amazing Amounts of Pointless Effort

I openly admit to being obsessed with music consumption.  I also admit to fanatically loving anything that has to do with the whole Scott Pilgrim franchise.  Due to bad timing and my distaste for going to movie theaters alone I didn't get to see Scott Pilgrim Vs. The World until the home video release of the film.  Since then I've been rapidly consuming the deliciously deep contents of the Blu-Ray version of the movie.  But that's more of an aside than anything else, so I'll head back on topic.

Before I was able to see the film I'd already beaten the Scott Pilgrim video game and listened through the soundtrack for the film and the video game and I had of course been buying up the books since just before the sixth book was published.  The movie soundtrack featured a fantastic song by the Canadian indie pop band Metric.  I'd loved Metric's first release Old World Underground, Where Are You Now? but have completely failed to follow the group since that album way back in 2003.  It was great to be pulled back in and I already ran out (to iTunes) to get their most recent release Fantasies, which went platinum in Canada. Now, we've established my love of the song, but what I'm working towards is the song's placement in the film.

The soundtrack is a mixture of original compositions for the bands within the film, songs repurposed for the film, and original music for the soundtrack... pretty typical stuff there.  Metric's sole contribution was the previously unreleased "Black Sheep."  Interestingly enough, the singer of Metric Emily Haines was actually the inspiration upon which creator Brian Lee O'Malley drew to create Envy Adams  As it turns out when I heard the song being played I had the answer to two questions. 

 The only band in the Scott Pilgrim world that I didn't have a handle on was The Clash at Demonhead.  From the book art, you can tell that the band is made up of a bassist, drummer and vocalist/keyboardist.  But still, I couldn't get a real feel for the sound they would make.  I'm sure at this point you can clearly see where I'm going with all of this endless typing; Black Sheep is the song preformed by The Clash at Demonhead in the film.  Marrying the real and fictional band was perfect and I felt like my mental construct of the Scott Pilgrim world was complete, yet there was still a problem.

The version of Black Sheep on the official soundtrack was quite different from the film version.  Metric performs the album version whereas in the film the song is preformed by the folks we see up on stage, Brie Larson (vocals, keys), Tennessee Thomas (drums), and former Clark Kent Brandon Routh (bass).   Well, I'm me so I have to both versions of the song.  My immediate thought was the rip the song straight off the DVD using the wonderful Audio Hijack pro from the wonderful folks at Rogue Amoeba, but that didn't have the complete song.  Next, I found an official music video that features the complete performance, hurrah!  Still, the audio quality was crap and there were jumps in the audio tracks.  Failure seemed imminent, until....

I discovered, while scouring all the Scott Pilgrim vs. The World audio tracks on iTunes, a band called The Evil Exes.  The band only had one song titled Black Sheep (from "Scott Pilgrim Vs. The World").  Bam!  All that time I spent running around and I had the track just sitting metaphorical inches away from fingers.

Anyways, that's that.  I'm going to do the best I can to post audio/video for both song versions so you can know that it was totally worth it all.

First here is Metric's version:

And now the film version

Scott Pilgrim vs. The World - 'Black Sheep' Music Video from Louis S on Vimeo.