New Moon Soundtrack
Various
Chop Shop/Atlantic
(57m 36s)
4/5

IF you can momentarily block your ears from the noise of lustful screaming in the direction of anything to do with Robert Pattinson, star of those vampire romance movies, you might find the time to listen to the soundtrack of one of them. New Moon, the second in the Twilight series, ups the ante for teen-movie soundtracks. And well it might, now that it's a billion-dollar franchise.

Presumably most of the bands here haven't a bog's notion about Stephenie Meyer's hugely successsful Mormon tales of supernatural abstinence, but you can imagine that record company execs were trading their grannies to get their acts a look-in. As a result, it's the cream of the pale-skinned crop here: Death Cab For Cutie, Thom Yorke, Muse, Editors, The Killers, Grizzly Bear, Bon Iver, St Vincent, OK Go, Black Rebel Motorcycle Club, Lykke Li, and a couple of whoareyiz.

How annoying for indie fans, who'll have to listen to it because it's rather good. Primed to be this generation's Baz Luhrmann's Romeo and Juliet soundtrack, it ticks all fanged boxes: yearning courtesy of Death Cab For Cutie, weirdness from Thom Yorke and cold emotion à la Editors. There's an overall theme elsewhere: moons, vampires, tension-filled love affairs with vampires, more moons, the swooning detachment of vampires, and so on. Bravo to the undead, then, as New Moon has actually made blockbuster soundtracks interesting again.

Download: 'Meet Me On The Equinox', 'No Sound But The Wind', 'Hearing Damage'