“New Moon” On Friday: The Twilight Of The Indie Boom?

Our look at the closing lines of new music reviews continues with a roundup of reactions to the New Moon soundtrack, the indie-kid-pandering tie-in to the forthcoming Twilight sequel that arrives in stores and online today: • “All this aural audacity is perfectly positioned with the youthful target audience who have thus far consumed all things Twilight-related. Pasty vampires with great hair on the big screen now have a killer soundtrack to accompany their every bite.” [Ron Harris, AP] • “But though the contributors are mostly A-list alternative or indie-rockers — including Grizzly Bear, Death Cab for Cutie, Bon Iver and St. Vincent — the overall tone is a bit muted, considering this is supposed to be a fantasy soap-opera dripping with supernatural blood and lust. Only the Killers, with Brandon Flowers channeling Bauhaus’ Peter Murphy, bring a welcome dash of Gothic flamboyance. Much of the rest is mid-level and middle-brow, from respected artists who have done better work elsewhere.” [Greg Kot, Chicago Tribune] • “But does it really matter if the original songs on this soundtrack are up to scratch or not? Not really. New Moon is a cross-promotional marketing extravaganza. Film producers get a cool bunch of bands to spread the gospel of their flick to music fans, bands get an entry point into the teenage market. Everybody wins, right?” [Matt Schild, Aversion] • “Moon (due in stores Oct. 20) yields several happy revelations from its lower-marquee names: Nordic songstress Lykke Li’s nearly a cappella ‘Possibility’ is a lovely little Swedish snowflake, and jokey rockers OK Go achieve an impressive sort of Flaming Lips-y quirk-gravitas on the sprawling, cinematic ‘Shooting the Moon.’ Black Rebel Motorcycle Club’s acoustic campfire lament ‘Done All Wrong’ segues seamlessly into the jaunty, Strokes-ian guitar fuzz of Hurricane Bells’ ‘Monsters.’ Think of New Moon as a sort of survey course in new-now-next rock: a mixtape with teeth.” [Leah Greenblatt, EW. Side note: The soundtrack, of course, gets an A, because where would EW be without its constant shilling for vampires these days? It would likely be even closer to the magazine scrap heap than it already is. I’m sure Greenblatt enjoyed the record, but it’s really really hard not to call BS on this particular bit of grade-inflation—and even harder to not wonder if EW actually muffed it, since an A- would have surely fired up EW‘s all-important commenter traffic. (And wasn’t Lykke Li “new-now-next” in 2008?)]