Album Review: The Twilight Saga: New Moon [OST] by Various Artists

On a good day, film soundtracks enhance the moviegoing experience. At their best, they transcend it. The latest sonic accompaniment to Twilight‘s inescapable teen-vampire juggernaut — a swooning conveyance of girl-meets-undead-boy romance, delivered by some of the best established and emerging names in the indie stratosphere — may sway even the most committed Twi-loathers.

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It would be foolish to attempt to dismiss the influence and commercial success of the Twilight franchise; whilst prominent writers such as Stephen King have questioned Stephanie Meyer’s abilities as a novelist and various critics have written off the film adaptations as moronic teenage pish, the modern day love story between the willowy Bella Swan and brooding vampire Edward Cullen has certainly captured the hearts of a generation that needed something neoteric to feast upon after Harry Potter. New Moon, the second film in the series is basically a story about yearning for lost love; to reflect this, the film needed a fitting soundtrack. So music supervisor Alexandra Patsavas was once again brought on board for the project after assembling the commercially successful accompaniment for the first film.

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Indie kids beware—your heroes just got co-opted. While hardly a cohesive gathering, from Death Cab For Cutie doing what they do best (channeling youthful melancholy), to Lykke Li's unexpected gravitas, it would be difficult to ask for a better group of ambassadors..

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Sensitive young men who avoid sunlight and the gloomy misfit young women who adore them: For all the gasps that greeted Twilight author Stephanie Meyer's recent embrace of indie rock, the parallels between the two are obvious enough. On different scales, each has seen its financial fortunes rise the past few years as well. The music industry's troubles are widely known, but indie's stock continues to climb.

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You can forget that it’s a soundtrack for a big Hollywood movie and you can forget that the movie is about vampires and werewolves (unless of course you like that sort of thing). But you should walk away from this remembering that The Twilight Saga: New Moon Soundtrack is an excellent album of cool songs featuring some of today’s celebrated indie artists. All of the various indie styles are represented here (electronic, indie-pop, psych-rock, brit-pop, alt-rock, chamber-pop, post-rock, etc.) and the music seems to parallel the stylistic ebb and flow of what I imagine would be the melodramatic ups and downs of a vampire movie.

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MICHAEL BUBLé"Crazy Love" (143/Reprise) Michael Bublé is a master at juggling musical attitudes, and his new CD, “Crazy Love,” whose title comes from the Van Morrison song, is his most confident balancing act yet. Mr. Bublé respects the Sinatra tradition but doesn’t try to slavishly copy ….

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