At Long Last... Music And Songs From Arrested Development is the name of the long awaited soundtrack for the oft championed canceled show recently revived by Netflix. And surprisingly, it's pretty decent.

A lot of the music found on this CD is background music from the show. Some instrumental, some with lyrics, but almost all of it not really intended to be in the foreground. Which is part of the charm of many of the tunes. And even when you were supposed to notice the music, it was often just the puctuation of a joke happening on screen.

Here you will find songs like "Big Yellow Joint", "Shot By Love", "Bang Bang Bang Bang", "You'll Never Hear From Me Again" and many more. There are also a number of medleys of incidental music, all of which make great background for having conversations. In fact, every time I played this disc, I found myself talking over it and not paying much attention to the songs, which is kind of bad, but also fairly interesting that the music seems to foster communcation. There is a lot of ukulele here, so if you don't like ukulele, you might not like this.

Composer David Schwartz really set the tone for the show with this music, which crosses many styles but always maintains a certain level of levity and poppy snap to it. This, of course, was a big part of the show. Even when the characters were on a downward spiral or doing poorly, the show kept it light and injected humor into everything.

I think the only song on the disc that I would choose to listen to more often or out of the context of being part of the Arrested Development soundtrack would be the last of the 42 tracks, "Boomerang". It's the only track that doesn't feel completely owned by the show, as if it could stand on it's own. This is probably because it wasn't written by David Schwartz, but by his daughter Lucy Schwartz, and is also available on her album Timekeeper.

Whether or not you were a big fan of the show, there is good music to be found on the Arrested Development sountrack that might make it worth your time. I know for me it was worth it to discover Lucy Schwartz, whose albums I've since bought.