While one motion picture soundtrack to the new movie, “Bill & Ted Face the Music,” features the score by Mark Isham, the far more entertaining of the two features original songs, and a couple borrowed, which are featured in the film (10K Projects Records). Too clever-for-their-own-good rockers Weezer buoy the album with “Beginning of the End (Wyld Stallyns edit)”, as frontman Rivers Cuomo croons, “Nostradamus predicted a bomb would drop/And all our guitars will be hung in an old pawn shop,” the song replete with screeching guitars and whirling drums. (The Wyld Stallyns are the fictitious band helmed by the movie’s stoner namesakes.) Cold War Kids stay melodic with a gentle trounce on “Story Of Our Lives,” while Big Black Delta metal-slams it on “Lost in Time.” There’s plenty of Van Halen-esque axe trickery and power-rock synth on most of the tracks, which is exactly what you’d expect from San Dimas, California’s time-traveling duo of William S. Preston, Esq., and Ted “Theodore” Logan, a.k.a. the names in the movie title. Most of the lyrics are as apocalyptic as you might guess, while a music video for the Weezer cut sees the band performing with flashing lights, a giant wind machine (okay, a table fan) and costume changes, as clips from the movie play intermittently. Bill & Ted pop up to do a few catchphrases and ask the group if they know any KISS. If Yes and Metallica had a head-banging baby, it might sound something like this.

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As the world begins to reopen movieplexes, the soundtrack to the new Christopher Nolan directed film “Tenet” (Water Tower Music), with music by Ludwig Goransson, sometimes sounds like a marching band fell down a flight of stairs. It’s hard to conceptualize the 18 tracks without having the seen the picture. The opener, “Rainy Night in Tallinn” is a clamoring eight-minute opus, while “Windmills” follows closely, ever so haunting and slightly suspenseful. The tracks, plunking notes like water drops in a torture chamber, work well enough and seem to underline the central theme of the film (“Tenet” is about a man/person/animal who loses his beloved wife in a tragic accident/violent murder/onstage drowning/suicide and, propelled by his anger and grief, attempts to accomplish extraordinary/unprecedented/morally murky/scientifically impossible/illegal things in the field of science/police work/magic/vigilante justice. How’s that for no spoilers? No matter how you slice it, the soundtrack is a sensory experience, jarring one minute, with pathos the next. Sure, “Red Room, Blue Room,” sounds like whales mating at first and yes, some of the tracks sound like Zamfir snuck into the recording studio, but overall, if you’re a movie soundtrack junkie, and are familiar with Nolan’s work (“The Dark Knight,” “Inception”), this one will shake, rattle and roll you.

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Pop charmer Sara Bareilles, Broadway baby and co-creator of the Apple-TV series, “Little Voice,” returns with another collection of original songs, “More Love: Songs from Little Voice, season one” (Epic). Bareilles’ voice and knack for wrapping her words and music around an emotion shine on this set, from the first track, “I Don’t Know Anything,” which is dreamy and poignant, to the radio-ready “More Love,” with its thundering cajon and snappy melody. In between scoring Emmy nods, Grammy nods and a win, Tony award nominations after her first try, “Waitress,” became an unexpected hit, and now co-creating a popular streaming TV show, Barielles has found the time to write and record a second collection of love songs from and inspired by the series.

Though the album crackles with personality, the singer/songwriter herself has said that sometimes she writes “melancholy,” saying “I think in my heart of hearts, I don’t feel like there is such a thing as too close to the darkness. I think we can’t be afraid of what is, and the closer we can go to what’s just true, it sort of takes the bite out of it. f you can just be with whatever the feeling is and know that you don’t have to change it or fix it, working on the practice of acceptance, I think, is a really, it’s a huge theme for me in my music. It’s certainly part of what I want to sort of preach in my own way to my fans that like we are all perfectly imperfect.”

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