The Twilight Saga: New Moon Original Motion Picture Soundtrack Review

The next installment of the “Twilight” movie series will premiere Friday and tickets are already selling out. 

For The Twilight Saga: New Moon Original Motion Picture Soundtrack, the artist selection strayed from the more mainstream bands featured on the first Twilight soundtrack and compiled a mix of indie-rock heavyweights that do not disappoint.

Perhaps the most interesting element of the soundtrack is not the artists featured on it, but that almost every song on the soundtrack is an original piece made specifically for the Twilight movie.

Death Cab for Cutie’s radio friendly original “Meet Me on the Equinox” opens the album.

The song is classic Death Cab, but its lyrics seem painfully forced. It’s as if the band wrote the song with the objective of including as many clear Twilight references as possible.

Lyrics such as “Let our bodies intertwine / But always understand that everything ends” seem like they could have been taken straight out of Meyer’s book.

Lykke Li’s “Possibility” is a gorgeous piano ballad that will surprise those only familiar with her singles and Grizzly Bear’s “Slow Life,” which features singer Victoria Legrand of Beach House, is a fantastic swirl of harmonies and symphonic bliss.

Thom Yorke’s “Hearing Damage” is the standout piece on the soundtrack. It’s a jittery electronic ballad of sorts similar in style to the tracks on Radiohead’s last full-length album “In Rainbows.”

Yorke also wrote “Hearing Damage” specifically for the Twilight soundtrack, but unlike Death Cab for Cutie’s original piece, “Hearing Damage” could easily fit onto one of Yorke’s or Radiohead’s own albums.

Its chorus of “You can do no wrong in my eyes” is perfectly applicable to the relationship between Twilight’s protagonist Bella and her vampire lover Edward, but is still ambiguous enough to avoid seeing flashes of the movie upon every listen.

The majority of the soundtrack features dreamy and atmospheric songs with hushed overtones and lots of acoustics, but there are a few upbeat tracks.

“Monsters” by Hurricane Bells is sure to get stuck in your head, in a good way, and Band of Skulls’ “Friends” is another toe-tapper.

Though none of the songs on the New Moon soundtrack are representative of their respective artists’ best work, the soundtrack is a great introduction to indie music for all those Twi-hards who haven’t yet experienced it, and definitely worth the buy.