VA - Wicker Park - Soundtrack Album (2004)

Wicker Park uses the explorative, plaintive, and chilly, yet ultimately quite accessible tones of indie rock and pop to soundtrack the cheekbones of Josh Hartnett. Like Zach Braff's Garden State and TV's dreamy/smart O.C., the film's music supervisors recognized the early aughts migration of public taste toward this more intelligent sound, a trend driven at least in part by indie music's profile in the areas of downloading and advertising licensing. Wicker Park includes some of whom have become usual suspects -- the tasteful, decadent pop of Snow Patrol; Mazzy Star; the requisite Shins cameo. But it also goes a little deeper than you might expect, offering the slick yet brazenly honest "Light Switch" from up-and coming-songstress Jame Wyatt, quietly deliberate post-rock from Mogwai, and the fragile icicles of +/- and "All I Do." It was only a matter of time until the electro-organic whimsy of Múm's "We Have a Map of the Piano" ended up on a soundtrack, especially in the what's-cool-next climate of the mid-2000s. And, in the tradition of Seth Cohen, Wicker Park gives mad props to Death Cab for Cutie. There's an acoustic version of Photo Album's "A Movie Script Ending" here, as well as what feels like the comp's centerpiece, Postal Service's somewhat famous cover of Phil Collins' "Against All Odds [Take a Look at Me Now]." Combining kitsch factor, engagingly glitchy, liquidy programming, sensitive guy vocals, and the credentials of Dntel and Ben Gibbard, "Odds" might be indie music's penultimate signifier in the widescreen marketplace. Other highlights of the set include Broken Social Scene's druggy, explicit "Lover's Spit," a cutesy Mates of State cover of Jackson Browne's "These Days" (previously only available on 7"), and Concrete Blonde's Johnette Napolitano infusing Coldplay's maudlin "Scientist" with a dusky world-weariness.~ Review by Johnny Loftus