King Of California

Composer David Robbins has come up with an offbeat score for director Mike Cahill’s offbeat comedy King of California, about a released mental patient (Michael Douglas) digging for Spanish gold under a suburban Costco store with the help of his teenage daughter (Evan Rachel Wood). For Robbins, the chief means of finding a musical equivalent of the goings-on lies in instrumentation. “Quite often when I start a new project,” he writes in his liner notes, “I find that I gravitate toward a particular instrument that helps to inspire me and hopefully lends itself to the style I’m after.” In this case, that instrument was the ukulele, that humble, child’s version of a guitar, and Robbins has also made extensive use of the banjo, as well as the musical saw, to create a set of weird, folky cues. There are also some changes of pace mixed in, including a song by Jolie Holland, some mariachi horns, an old track by Yma Sumac, and the a cappella “Zari Ritual Lamentation” by the Lileh Choir of Dmanisi. The result is as entertaining as it is odd. – William Ruhlmann