In an aptly-timed effort to re-launch the starlet’s self-titled sophomore disc, Epic has turned the soundtrack to Mandy Moore’s new movie, A Walk to Remember, into a mini-marketing machine. Akin to the label’s savvy release of Moore’s I Wanna Be With You EP in 2000, the soundtrack is loaded with several new tracks by Moore as well as her latest single, “Cry,” from the largely under-appreciated Mandy Moore. But tactics aside, Moore continues to prove she’s one step ahead of the teen-pop pack with the stirring piano ballad “Only Hope” and a cover of New Radicals’s “Someday We’ll Know,” which features Danielle Brisebois (a former Epic casualty, ironically enough) and Switchfoot’s Jonathan Foreman. Brisebois surfaces again on “Mother We Just Can’t Get Enough,” a quirky and subversive gem culled from New Radicals’s 1999 opus Maybe you’ve been brainwashed too. But with four expertly crafted pop/rock tracks (the original version of “Only Hope” among them), it’s Foreman and his band Switchfoot that truly make good on the soundtrack; their mix of brightly poignant lyrics (“There’s a song that’s inside of my soul/It’s the one that I’ve tried to write over and over again”) and fragile guitar pop are certainly something to remember.
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