At this point, most people acknowledge that there's indie rock-- music produced without corporate financial backing-- and Indie Rock, a corporately funded mainstream genre that's defined by normative musical aesthetics, not ideology or actual practice. The same idea carries over to indie film. There's a festival and art-house circuit that's essentially Hollywood's shadow, governed not by artistic and financial freedom but by its own internal hierarchies and genre trappings. A number of tiresome trends have infected this circuit in recent years, including a cynical approach to ethnic and identity politics to garner perfunctory acclaim, condescending caricatures of rural types, and the accumulation of quirks and non-sequiturs in lieu of credible characterization.
The first thing you notice when you visit the website for Woodpecker, a new film by Alex Karpovsky, is that it's been burning up the indie festival circuit-- it has more garlands than an ancient Roman senate. To me, this sets off warning bells, which are not stilled by the film's plot summary-- bird watching enthusiasts (ding) converge on a small town in Arkansas (ding ding) to search for the elusive Ivory Billed Woodpecker (DING DING DING!). Right there, you've got idiosyncratic milieu and risible rednecks, not to mention a light existential allegory-- and, bonus, a tie to Sufjan Stevens. But despite these misgivings, this seductive, subtle soundtrack makes me want to see the film.
Woodpecker was scored by the notable choral and concert music composer James Lavino, who has a few prior soundtrack credits (including Karpovsky's The Hole Story). Its players include Radiohead's Colin Greenwood (whose prior soundtrack work is limited to a credit on his more experienced brother's Bodysong OST) and Clap Your Hands Say Yeah's Sargent brothers, Lee and Tyler. Each track matches a scene in the film-- e.g. "The Gift Store", "The Haircut"-- to one simple, complementary theme. The melodic impact of each theme is bold but reserved; the music's discretion increases its quiet allure. The only real drawback to the soundtrack is that it's rather slight. We get 15 themes in about half an hour, and most of them are strong enough that you wish they'd go on a bit longer.
The record conjures the magical feeling of the forest, the coolness of stream-cooled tree shade, the peaceful sensation of walking on pine needles. The music more resembles a hummingbird than a woodpecker: It lightly hovers and flits. The tone is established from the start-- "The Thing With Feathers", a synthesized dirge that evokes woodwinds, with dreamy acoustic guitar chords rolling through-- and remains unbroken through the twittering chimes, house backbeat, and Spanish guitar of closing track "The Bird Suit". The soundtrack stays interesting by complicating a single mood with multiple genre allusions. "How to Look at a Bird" is smoldering lounge-noir. "The Gift Store" is arpeggiated folk. Tambourine and enchanted guitar flourishes give "Raising Pigeons in Phoenix" a trippy spaghetti western feel. "Peeling Bark" is sugar-coated blues, "A Powerful Need" is a shimmying Latin dance, and "Rediscovery" is twangy country.
Lavino and company have stripped away all the context from these genres and rendered them as sonic wallpaper, which is appropriate for a film score and surprisingly satisfying on its own. There's no rawness in their blues, no pain in their country, no ideology in their folk, no drugs in their psychedelia, no sex in their samba. As such, the focus shifts to the fineness and restraint of the playing and the imagistic potency of the themes. It's difficult to imagine the Sargent brothers playing on this: CYHSY aren't exactly known for their subtlety, and the Sargents seem especially Ritalin-deprived when performing live with that band. Here, they're calm and deliberate instead of eccentric and frenzied; hopefully the film (which has yet to hit theaters) applies the same judicious energy to its potentially over-the-top concept.
