When we first did a Best Soundtrack Moments Of 2013 last December, it was initially thought up as a one-off. But, hey, then we decided to turn it into a column! So the approach this year is a bit different. Last December, I spent a lot of time digging back through TV and movies I had missed, scouring things for music moments that stood out. This year, it was all about what had lingered with me over the course of the year, scenes and songs that I couldn't get out of my head well after the fact. That means there's some good stuff that might've popped up on this list quite a bit over the last twelve months, but didn't have one major moment that struck me again when it came to think about the year at large. The soundtrack moments that did make it range from stuff that just made me really happy to stuff that was deeply emotionally evocative to stuff that was just brilliantly composed within the framework of its respective film or TV show. (I was a bit too transient to keep up with video games this year, unfortunately, but shout out to the bizarre, very brief use of the Clash's "Should I Stay Or Should I Go" in the very beginning of Far Cry 4.) The common denominator is that this is stuff I thought could go toe-to-toe with the kind of moments that made last year's list, the kind of stuff that'll hold up and stick in my memory when 2015's own onslaught of media starts up in earnest.
Some quick stipulations, before we get started. If you back to January's installment of Trackspotting, you'll notice Her and Inside Llewyn Davis and The Wolf Of Wall Street represented, because I had been back in Pennsylvania last December/January, and those movies didn't see wide release until after the end-of-year list for 2013 had been filed. I didn't count them as 2014 movies here, but they all have some amazing use of music if you haven't seen them yet. Also, before anyone gets apoplectic about Gone Girl not being included: I typically try to avoid including scores in this column. It's supposed to be more about how a show or movie or whatever makes interesting use of a pop song, how it takes an independent piece of work and incorporates it into its own universe. So, while material like Gone Girl or Johnny Greenwood's score for Inherent Vice would be worthy of digging into extensively on a month-to-month basis, by the time we get to the end of year wrap-up there's more than enough great pop moments to dig into, so that's where we're going. (WARNING: There are spoilers ahead, so proceed with caution!)
20. Chef
In general, I gravitate toward the heavy moments in art -- for the purposes of this column, that usually means the sort of music cues that represent cathartic emotional swells in a movie or TV show. And, man, 2014 was a heavy year in general. Politically, atmospherically, and, on a personal level, one with a handful of big changes in my life that I'm still processing. So there are a lot of heavy moments on their way further down this list! But before that, there's Chef, a movie that has its own amusingly sad moments (I still love the scene with Jon Favreau's protagonist Carl Casper watching a street performer make a toy skeleton mime along to Al Green's "Tired Of Being Alone), but mostly just celebrates the joys in life. Family, good food, fun music, etc., etc. Chef is a casual movie made by people with a lot of means. Jon Favreau got famous pals to stop by for small roles, and he packed his movie to the brim with music as vibrant as all the food looks onscreen, giving the whole viewing experience this vibe of kicking back with friends. (The Latin jazz is where most of the good times are, but the rising tension of Liquid Liquid's "Cavern" building toward Carl's blow-up at the food critic is also still a winner.) I haven't seen this movie in its entirety since May, and Joe Cuba's "Bang! Bang!" is still getting stuck in my head all the time, and that's never a thing that doesn't put you in a better mood. Every now and then, comfort food like Chef or "Bang! Bang!" is all you want.
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19. The Skeleton Twins - Blondie, "Denis"
There are so many ways this could've gone wrong in another movie. Starting the whole thing off by soundtracking Milo's (Bill Hader) suicide attempt with the glossy New Wave of Blondie's "Denis?" It could've come off as trivializing or somehow precious. Somehow, though, even if The Skeleton Twins was advertised as a mildly sharp-edged family-drama indie-comedy, the movie manages to go to darker-than-expected places while still, ultimately, traveling in comedic and more or less uplifting waters. In that sense, the "Denis" sequence actually manages to solidify the movie's tone in one quick burst, showing early on how The Skeleton Twins blends darkness and quirkiness, which really means it winds up feeling a lot more human than anticipated.
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18. Before I Disappear
Shawn Christensen's Before I Disappear hasn't garnered the same amount of praise as his 2012 Oscar-winning short Curfew, which served as the basis for his full-length debut. Having never seen Curfew, I could still kind of tell where the story had been unnaturally stretched to fill 90 minutes, between odd tonal shifts and weird side characters who seemed out of a different movie than the core story of Richie (Christensen) and his niece Sophia (Fatima Ptacek). But one nice thing about the budget of a full-length is how much music Christensen could cram in. You might recognize his name: He was the frontman of Stellastarr, one of the bands involved in the early '00s NYC rock resurgence. So he knows a good song. The Animals' "House Of The Rising Sun" is the kind of song built for dramatic film moments far larger than anything in Before I Disappear, so it's still great when it plays as Richie rises in slow motion after getting into a fight with Sophia's asshole dad in a music shop. Christensen may be more indebted to the old, gritty Lower East Side than to contemporary Brooklyn, but his depictions of the latter are still convincing, between Richie walking through a party smoking as Tame Impala's "Elephant" plays above, or he and an acquaintance having a particularly intense conversation as the War On Drugs' "Red Eyes" is in the background. The best of them might be one of the film's earliest cues, when a still-suicidal Richie takes a ton of pills and begins to hallucinate that a man is coming to his apartment to settle a debt. He walks out into the hallway, amongst a party full of people in weird costumes, still holding the phone until he borrows a partygoer's bow, notches an arrow and aims at the elevator door. David Bowie's "Five Years" soundtracks the whole sequence, which is completely surreal and memorable with or without the movie surrounding it.
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17. Halt And Catch Fire Season 1
AMC's new Halt And Catch Fire had an intriguing pilot and premise, an on-and-off record for half the season, and then started to get really quite good in the latter half, leaving me thinking the show could have a lot of promise. There isn't necessarily ingenious use of music in the show -- it's set in the early '80s, so it uses early-'80s music. But, hey, it's drawing on one of my favorite eras of music, so I'm not going to complain about Cameron walking into Cardiff Electric to the Clash, or Joe and Gordon staying up all weekend working on a computer to XTC, or the crew at a hotel room party in Vegas where A Flock Of Seagulls' "Space Age Love Song" can be heard. My favorite moment from the show so far is still the beginning of its third episode, "High Plains Hardware," where Gary Numan's "Are Friends Electric?" plays as Joe stares around his apartment naked, intercut with the mornings of Gordon and Cameron. It isn't always perfectly clear where it wants to go with images like that, but Halt And Catch Fire is very good at coming up with them. Bonus points for the fact that they used the not-from-the-'80s-but-could-be War On Drugs' "Red Eyes," albeit too briefly, as Joe and Cameron and Gordon and Donna climactically drive away to Vegas in the season's third-to-last episode.
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16. White Bird In A Blizzard
Cocteau Twins' "Heaven Or Las Vegas" was one of those songs not released this year that wound up defining my 2014 anyway. So as soon as White Bird In A Blizzard's title came onscreen accompanied by their "Sea, Swallow Me," I was onboard with the film musically, even if the story itself was a bit of a mixed bag. Part of the movie is a dreamlike haze retelling of adolescence and discovery, with Shailene Woodley's Kat obsessing over sex while the Psychedelic Furs or Tears For Fears or Depeche Mode linger in the atmosphere. There's a borderline nostalgic tone to that portion of White Bird, and the whole topic is something that an '80s set drama and '80s pop songs always seem unnaturally well-suited for. The rest of the movie leans more nightmarish -- Kat's mother's disappearance, the eventual awful revelation of why. Former Cocteau Twins guitarist Robin Guthrie bridges all of this with his score -- which sounds, fittingly, like Cocteau Twins music -- but on the nightmarish end of things the one moment that's really stuck with me is the sequence in which Eva Green's Eve (the aforementioned disappeared mother of Kat) drunkenly dances in front of Kat and her boyfriend while Echo & The Bunnymen's "Bring On The Dancing Horses" plays. Man, if you're young and impressionable, it's the kind of scene that could mess you up. There's a sick hilarity to it, but also a deeply unsettling quality, especially when considering the revelations held at the end of the film. I haven't been able to shake "Bring On The Dancing Horses" since I saw it.
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15. A Most Violent Year Trailer - Marvin Gaye, "Inner City Blues (Make Me Wanna Holler)"
Sometimes in this column, there's room for trailers, the ones that function as their own little emotive works; bits of imagery and sound that might entice you to see the movie but can also be captivating two-minute worlds on their own. So, here's a trailer for A Most Violent Year, a movie about crime in early-'80s NYC, directed by J.C. Chandor (the man behind the great Margin Call and All Is Lost, which is supposed to be great but I still haven't seen it), starring Oscar Isaac and Jessica Chastain, and those are two people who can't really do any wrong in my book as of right now. These are a lot of factors for a movie to have in its favor. And it's soundtracked by Marvin Gaye's "Inner City Blues." Besides the fact that "Inner City Blues" is my favorite Marvin Gaye song, it's also the kind of song that just screams "cinematic." There are a bunch of little poetic touches in here already, as a trailer -- the way Jessica Chastain moves her hand, says "This was very disrespectful," and then the those opening moments of "Inner City Blues" come in -- the kind of opening moments that, too, suggest a whole world -- that's the way you make an artful and gripping trailer. I wish the song continued on through the whole thing, but the gasping anxiety of the trailer's final minute serves as a pretty effective, things-are-falling-apart counterpoint to the first half. "Inner City Blues" is the kind of song that sounds like things are simmering and simmering, just waiting to explode. Given the pedigree this movie has going for it, I really hope it delivers on the promise.
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14. I Origins – Radiohead, "Motion Picture Soundtrack"
It's a remarkably hard thing to take a Radiohead song and make it your own, to use it in a movie or on TV and not have it totally overpower the work in question. It's more remarkable, still, that I Origins was the movie to come along and use "Motion Picture Soundtrack" and to do it so damn well. I liked this movie, but I also wanted to like this movie; for a less forgiving viewer, the tonal shifts and gradual move into more abstract, sci-fi-leaning storytelling would be a dealbreaker. (Given, director Mike Cahill's on record saying this is a prequel to another movie he wanted to make, so it makes sense, but that's kind of tangential when you're judging a movie on its own merits, in a vacuum not-yet-occupied by a proposed companion piece.) In the movie's final minutes, a seeming defeat suddenly turns into a long-awaited triumph -- Ian Grey (Michael Pitt) finds the Indian child who shares the irises of his deceased wife Sofi, which suggests some sort of reincarnation, and a veer toward mysticism. But that's it: Then the movie ends, and you're left unsure what the implications for Cahill's hoped-for sequel might be. Still, if you've gone along for the I Origins ride up until that point, there's a significant poignancy to the final, unresolved revelation, and Ian's slow motion walk out of the hotel, carrying the child, with no sound other than a few minutes of "Motion Picture Soundtrack," is one of the more beautiful, ethereal moments I saw in a movie this year.
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13. Fargo Season 1
Shows rarely have a tone as well-developed as Fargo did earlier this year, before the show even premiered. Given, it had the advantage of the rich Coen brothers filmography to draw upon, but still -- it had its own thing going on, too. In less than half a minute, you watch Billy Bob Thornton pull out a vicious knife to cut his steak at a diner while a muzak rendition of Daniel Powter's "Bad Day" plays, and simultaneously you immediately know what you're getting into even if you have no idea what to expect. Even when the show got really dark (Lorne Malvo's pure animalism; Lester tricking Malvo into murdering his innocent second wife instead of him) it balanced it out with sadistic quirk (Lester's ultimate, undignified demise). At the end of the show's second episode "The Rooster Prince," in one of the show's few big moments featuring music other than the score, the two hitmen from Fargo dispose of a body in a frozen lake while Eden Ahbez's meditative proto-hippie spoken word "Full Moon" plays. Some reviewers pointed out that the show felt indebted to Breaking Bad as well, and while Fargo's brand of maliciousness might've skewed more sardonic, that was definitely evident in a scene like this. There's a really, really wicked sense of humor at play, taking an old-timey obscurity like this and using it to soundtrack murderers. The fact that the ending of Fargo was ultimately a just and relatively happy one balances this out, keeps it from getting too craven or cynical. Fargo's an anthology series, and Season 2 will be a different story, so who knows how different the tone will be, but my hope is that they don't stray too far, and that there are more ridiculous/great sequences like the one that ends "The Rooster Prince."
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12. Foxcatcher - Bob Dylan, "This Land Is Your Land
Foxcatcher is a grim and sparse film, a methodically paced glimpse at American decline and the more corrosive and warped elements of American ambition. It's also, for much of its length, fairly subtle or underhanded: You're watching a movie about an impossibly rich eccentric, John du Pont, and his sponsorship of wrestlers for the 1988 Summer Olympics in Seoul, but if you don't know where this is all headed from the real-life story, you never really know why you're seeing what you're seeing. (Even if you do, that moment is still portrayed as randomly and unexplainably awful, which is fitting considering nobody understands what the motivation was in real life, either.) It's not a movie you'd go into expecting a lot of big music cues, and there aren't many. There is no dramatic '80s movie training montage set to some big pop song; this is a story that ends in tragedy, not triumph. But there are a few songs sprinkled throughout, including David Bowie's "Fame" at a post-victory party at the du Pont estate that ends in the unsettling look at how the whole enterprise is rooted in John's complicated search for either approval from or victory over his mother and her equestrian awards. The most striking moment, particularly for the lack of such flourishes surrounding it, is the scene in which Mark Schultz (the central wrestler, played by Channing Tatum) and du Pont are on the porch of the estate, doing coke, in the midst of whatever weird, creepy, kinda exploitative bond they have, as Bob Dylan's version of "This Is Your Land" plays. It's such a knowing, direct thing compared to the rest of the film, and in less-assured hands than Bennett Miller's, it'd probably be a disaster of a scene. But here, in Foxcatcher, it is a dense, perverse image of American class, American id, the pressures of some notion of American masculinity. This porch scene, in particular, is a kind of halfway point, a pivot from the Mark we see in the beginning, a bored and frustrated Olympian telling a lackadaisical auditorium full of elementary-school students that he wants to talk to them about America, to the hardened, inscrutable shell we see enter the UFC ring at the end of the movie, right before the credits abruptly truncate the "U.S.A.!" chants so that it's a stifled cry, an abstracted and fragmented statement of identity.
There actually isn't a good version of that Dylan cover on YouTube, so here's Bowie instead:
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11. Wild
The thing that's so great about the soundtrack to Wild is how the songs -- which are great, too -- reflect the major role music plays in our lives, the way a song can get bound to a memory or experience, and from there on can recall that experience, or a memory can recall the song, as if they've become one symbiotic unit. (That relationship in memory between image and sound is a big reason why I started doing this column in the first place; once you have an association with a song from a movie or show, it changes your relationship to both.) In Wild, Reese Witherspoon plays Cheryl Strayed, a woman who, after losing her mother and spiraling into heroin abuse and chronically cheating on her husband, decides to hike the entirety of the Pacific Crest Trail on her own as a sort of cleansing journey toward herself. Songs flit in and out -- early on she hitches a ride, and the Shangri-Las' "I Can Never Go Home Anymore" on the radio reminds her of dancing with her mother in the kitchen as a child. Later, the deeper she gets into her trip, you'll hear her sing along to songs, sometimes with made-up words, and the backing tracks will come in and out of focus, sometimes finally becoming clear and overcoming the scene for one brief moment. (It helps that one of these moments is with Bruce Springsteen's "Tougher Than The Rest." Always bonus points for Springsteen.) One of the more harrowing ones is Portishead's "Glory Box," which plays in the distance during a flashback where Cheryl meets a friend at a restaurant back home and stares out the window, then becomes much more present and visceral as she reveals she's pregnant (this is, presumably, amidst the divorce and heaviest heroin abuse).
Perhaps the most important one is Simon & Garfunkel's "El Condor Pasa (If I Could)," a song soundtracking a flashback where a frustrated, college-age Cheryl demands to know why her mom can be so happy with the state of their lives, and her mom explains her philosophy of not dwelling on the traumas of the past. Later, when Cheryl comes to the end of the trail, there's an interior monologue where she reflects on having gone through everything she had as being necessary, as being the stuff that lead her to some sense of resilience and knowing her self. She looks up to the sky, the credits roll, and the song returns -- connecting back to her memory of her mother, but now also to ours of Cheryl before the journey.
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10. St. Vincent - Bob Dylan, "Shelter From The Storm"
I still wish the credits sequence of St. Vincent -- in which Bill Murray's Vincent McKenna walks into his backyard, sneaks a smoke, and mutters along to Bob Dylan's "Shelter From The Storm" -- was attached to a greater film. St. Vincent was mostly solid, but it wasn't a classic, and if it had been, I feel like this small scene could've been inducted into the pantheon of all-time great Bill Murray moments. Of course, that's kind of the thing about it: This is a scene that works because it's Bill Murray, and we know and love Bill Murray, and this almost just plays out as a short of some kind, our beloved aging uncle chilling out in the backyard with some Dylan. Being more or less a child of the internet era, I'm no less susceptible to adoration for Bill Murray's late-career resurgence as a kind of mercurial indie hero prone to random, bound-to-go-viral public appearances, so there's a pretty heavy filter to the experience of this particular bit of Murray ephemera. Still, because of all that, it's just as charming as it was in October, and has its own quietly moving power to it.
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9. Boyhood
There's a weird paradox with Boyhood's use of music: It's enveloping when you're sitting there watching the movie, literally seeing these people age over 12 years and the songs that mark the steps along that path, but it doesn't have a ton of its own memorable music cues. Like Wild, Boyhood uses music to trace experience and memory, a few notes here and there might resurrect a face you can no longer recognize, or some other blurry childhood image. There's no denying the inherent power that comes with that. It's a hell of a moving experience, because even if you were nothing like this kid, there is probably no way in which this film doesn't make you dig into your own memory while you're watching it or as soon as you leave the theater. On that note, then, my opinion's the same as it was in July: Those Arcade Fire songs steal the show. Hearing "Suburban War" start as Mason and his girlfriend drive to Austin evokes all those searching, restless elements of youth, but it doesn't feel nostalgic. It remains a viewing experience that's both viscerally immediate for how it draws you back into your own life, but also ineffable and hard to pin down -- again, for how it draws you back into your own life.
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8. The Disappearance Of Eleanor Rigby – Orchestral Manouevres In The Dark, "So In Love"
It's a small touch in the grand scheme of the movie or amongst a lot of the more dominant moments on this list, but given what surrounds it, the scene in The Disappearance of Eleanor Rigby where Connor and Eleanor dance outside the car to OMD's "So In Love" still totally levels me.
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7. Land Ho!– Big Country, "In A Big Country"
Out of all the movies and TV shows on this list, Land Ho! is perhaps the smallest, most intimate of the bunch. It's a quiet film about two old guys, ex-brothers-in-law, who go on a trip to Iceland together. The two couldn't be more different -- Colin is a soft-spoken Australian and still licking his wounds from a recent divorce (which followed the death of his first wife), and Mitch is a roughened Southerner, abrasive in an avuncular way and with an affinity for weed and turning everything into a lewd comparison. It's one of my favorite movies of the year. When I first saw it in July, that might've been partially rooted in anticipation -- I knew I'd be going to Iceland for the first time in November, and I was swept up in how the movie so often lingers on images of the Icelandic countryside. But Land Ho! also closes with one of my favorite soundtrack moments in recent memory.
After a brief scene where Mitch and Colin survey the land, Mitch assures his old friend: "Good times are still a-comin.'" Meaning, on their trip, but it's also a vote of confidence after a film's worth of their conversations dancing around being old, obsolete, whatever. After Mitch says it, there's a quick cut to the two of them walking into the Blue Lagoon (an outdoor geothermal spa situation), robes on, drinks in hand, earning smiles and winks from cute girls in the water, Mitch throwing this goofy pistol sign with his hand, all as Big Country's "In A Big Country" comes back for a major reprise after its briefer showing earlier in the movie. It's a great little scene, and deservedly cinematic after a mostly restrained, realistic depiction of the trip. Besides "In A Big Country" being a favorite of mine and the scene just coming together so well, the sequence lingered with me throughout the latter half of the year. In November, I walked around Reykjavik listening to "In A Big Country" constantly. When I drove around the countryside a bit, I watched the sun set off one of those Icelandic beaches with black sand, then drove away over a hill and into an old lava field. "In A Big Country" came on right around then, those drum hits and guitars-aping-bagpipes feeling as life-affirming then as they did in Land Ho!. My trip was almost over at that point, but Mitch's quote echoed in my head that night: Good times are still a-comin'.
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6. The Americans Season 2
For a program about two Russian spies living undercover as a married couple in early-'80s D.C., unknown even to their American children, The Americans is a fittingly paced show -- intricately calibrated, coldly incisive. That being said, what makes the Cold War drama so special -- what makes it one of the best shows on TV, that is -- is how it manages to take the tension and stark claustrophobia of its setting and get at real, deep human themes. If you've followed or read about the show at all this point, you're probably familiar with the fact that it's really a drama about marriage. You relate to Philip and Elizabeth Jennings (Matthew Rhys and Keri Russell, giving some of the most overlooked performances on TV), and you relate to their neighbor Stan Beeman, the FBI agent who's looking for undercover Russian spies without realizing they live across the street, because of their relationships; Stan and Philip relate to each other for the same reason. But Season 2 took it that much further, delving into the relationship between a married couple and their growing children. Specifically: Once the kids get old enough to start having fully-developed personalities and thoughts of their own, they'll start to notice something's off with their parents, and how do Philip and Elizabeth proceed? Paige and Henry have been raised as actual Americans. Chances are, there's no way to preserve this family if any bit of the truth comes out.
The major music moments were few and parsed out carefully this season, but they foreshadowed some seriously dark revelations in the final episode. It all goes back to teasers from early this year, abstract commercials featuring Philip and Elizabeth twisting and turning in bed until their smeared bodies turned into a shadowy hammer and sickle, all while Sting's "Russians" played and built toward the inevitable line "I hope the Russians love their children, too." That was all groundwork, reestablishing the chilly atmosphere of the show. Then, in "The Walk In," the third episode of the season, there was the stunning concluding scenes, almost entirely devoid of dialogue, set to almost the entirety of Peter Gabriel's "Here Comes The Flood." It showed the four Jennings family members solitary, distant from one another, mainly focusing on Elizabeth burning the letter she promised Leanne, another embedded agent, that she would give her son Jared in the event that Leanne and her husband Emmett were ever murdered, which is what happened in the season's first episode. At the time, there wasn't much to care about with Leanne and Emmett -- the power of the scene came in watching Elizabeth do this, and thinking what sort of approaching flood might be coming for her own family.
While these were striking moments on their own as the season progressed, it's in hindsight where they become really unsettling and evocative, at the point where you realize how precisely these moments were deployed to set up your expectations in a certain way. In the season finale, we find out that Leanne and Emmett were in fact murdered by Jared, the one meant to receive the letter Elizabeth burned, because the KGB had turned him and his parents had objected. (The fact that he also murdered his sister, and the fact that part of how he was swayed to the cause was his infatuation with the Soviet handler Kate, makes the whole thing that much darker and shattering.) And they have hopes to do the same for Paige; it's a part of their new initiative for a second generation of even more deeply embedded agents. Adopting Sting's "Russians" line already made for a nice little complex reflection of the questions of national identity and loyalty that the show raises; now, at the end of the season, we realize the flood's already here and the whole question of who loves who in the kid/embedded parent agent equation could get a lot messier. As always, The Americans wound up being impressively thorny thematically and narratively, but it works so well because the show seems to move effortlessly. Everyone involved seems to have total control of what they're doing. That definitely goes for its musical decisions this season as well, which linger disturbingly, probably exactly as they were intended.
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5. The Leftovers Season 1 - James Blake's "Retrograde"
Back in April, HBO released the teaser for its new show The Leftovers. And it was totally entrancing. Set to James Blake's "Retrograde," it featured enough foreboding and action and stunning imagery to suggest a whole season, and it turns out all that was packed into the first episode. Some critics took issue with The Leftovers' near-unwavering brooding, its near-belligerent bleakness to some a sign of the negative fallout of prestige TV's developing legacy. Shows have to go dark, have to go heavy, to be taken seriously, etc., etc. Well, I was onboard with this show from the start (maybe I have the benefit of never having watched Lost, and not having the same lack of trust in showrunner Damon Lindelof). The Leftovers' darkness does make it tough to binge-watch; each episode demands a lot emotionally, and can certainly take its toll. But, still: It's a richly acted and written darkness, one worth luxuriating in once a week. Musically, the show often opted for sarcastic placement of songs far too pleasant for the environments they were now heard in, whether old soul tracks or boozy blues riffs. The moments where the music matched the tone of the show, however, were crushing.
After the teaser used "Retrograde," the pilot also made use of it too, soundtracking the tense moments leading up to a remembrance day for those that disappeared in the show's catalyst, a Rapture-like event. It's also an event bound to be ruined by the Guilty Remnant cult's protest. Where the teaser's impact was located in how it was edited just right -- portentous lines delivered over the unsettling build of "Retrograde" -- the pilot lets it play out, with no dialogue. It has its own power, but the teaser is so expertly put together that it still might be the most effective use of music The Leftovers has yet to offer. That's not to say there weren't more to follow. Soon after that "Retrograde" sequence, all hell does break loose at the ceremony, and Fuck Buttons' "Sweet Love For Planet Earth" provides what Fuck Buttons is really good at providing: some aural equivalent of the fabric of human existence and society getting worn away by the brutal insistence of nature. A similar rupture comes up in the season finale, when the Guilty Remnant exits their compound to an orchestral version of Metallica's "Nothing Else Matters," and you just know all hell's about to really break loose this time. (It does.) Still, there's a special quality to that first teaser, seemingly giving away so much but only barely hinting at what was to come in this season. It worked up so much anxiety in the best way, and even though HBO's giving the show a truncated second season, I imagine it'll continue to deliver.
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4. Guardians Of The Galaxy
There seems to be a slight age gap when it comes to the soundtrack for Guardians Of The Galaxy. People older than me -- say, old enough to remember these songs as new, from when they were children -- don't seem as taken with James Gunn loading up this space opera with occasionally ridiculous '70s music. Others cried "Tarantino-lite." Somewhat understandably, those fatigued by All Marvel Everything could've seen it as one more crass Illuminati plot for global domination: The zaniness mixed with nostalgia that is Guardians' soundtrack made it a really successful product in its own right, a nice little bonus tacked on to the movie's impressive box office haul. To all of which I say: Whatever. Guardians Of The Galaxy was some of the most fun I had watching anything this year, and that soundtrack played a significant role in that.
Matching with the ridiculously good banter between the central characters, the movie's fixation on '70s music only adds to the inherent and appealing goofiness of the whole thing. Here's a faux-serious sci-fi intro of Peter Quill (Chris Pratt) entering a cavern and turning on Redbone's "Come And Get Your Love" so he can dance around using alien lizards as a mic. And the moments pile up from there: Quill's prison escape to "(Escape) The Pina Colada Song," David Bowie's "Moonage Daydream" as the crew flies into Knowhere, the building-up-to-the-final-battle walk to the Runaways' "Cherry Bomb." Everything here is just so vibrant: the crazy spectrum of colors, the big, crunchy '70s cheesiness of the music. Even as someone who likes following all the minutiae of Marvel's Cinematic Universe, Guardians Of The Galaxy was a welcome thing: Its music might be old and at times nostalgic, but it's deployed in such a weird setting, with such weird characters, that it helped make the whole movie one of the fresher, more exciting things to watch in 2014.
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3. Mad Men Season 7A
A few weeks ago, I started to re-watch the entirety of Mad Men, and some things immediately struck me. I had forgotten Don Draper used to really be alluring, that he had an impossible charm that hooked everyone on the show and all of us viewers. There was, after all, a reason we wound up following him down more repulsive pathways as the show's latter seasons have worn on. The whole show had this stately glamor back then. It might've hammered home the racism and sexism of the early '60s, but there was also an inescapably enticing element to it all. Here's Manhattan and America in glory days, stylish and rich. Back then, there was a lot of jazz in the score, lightly dancing beneath the whole thing and giving it this playful step. Even with the earlier seasons' darker moments, those first episodes have the quality of just inviting you to come hang out with these people, in this time, before the show steadily amplified the drama.
The Mad Men we arrived at for this year's first half of Season 7 is a much different show. This isn't a universally held opinion, but to me the things Mad Men has done wrong add up to a very, very short list; the repetition of wallowing in Don's slow and steady decline is all part of the point. What's remarkable about how Mad Men has depicted these characters, over seven years of our lives and through one of the most dynamic and tumultuous and imagination-grabbing decades in American history, is how the show itself has adapted along the way. It's become more brazenly stylish, playing with its format and focus here and there to reflect the changes in the society it's talking about. This, naturally, includes music -- if you haven't heard, the '60s are quite a mythologized decade, musically. Looking back at that first season of Mad Men, it's hard to compute that it'd be the show to use the Beatles' "Tomorrow Never Knows" in a montage come Season 5.
Brilliant musical moments have piled up as Mad Men has progressed, from the Nashville Teens' "Tobacco Road" closing the first episode of Season 4, to "You Only Live Twice" closing Season 5, to an obscurity like the Fly-Bi-Nites' "Found Out" soundtracking Don's bad trip at a Hollywood party in Season 6. But few matched two that occurred in Season 7's first half. In the first episode, when we first see Don again as he arrives in California, the Spencer Davis Group's "I'm A Man" plays. Later in the season, when he and Peggy reach some kind of reconciliation, they dance to Frank Sinatra's "My Way" on the radio. Mad Men, of course, has a way with symbolism and intricately layered scenes. From a musical standpoint, these were some of its greatest achievements in that regard. Both of these scenes were so complex, said so much about these characters now and where they'd been together in the past. That's the benefit of making it to a seventh season and maintaining the quality Mad Men has: When you build up that kind of momentum, these moments feel huge and rewarding. They're great songs, they're great scenes, but they have some extra-special something for this big tapestry they get to play within.
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2. Inherent Vice
Paul Thomas Anderson's movies have good trailers. The trailers for The Master were like little pieces of art in themselves, weird and suggestive and with every shot looking like a painting. When the Inherent Vice trailer dropped in out of nowhere in September, it was another masterpiece. The kaleidoscope of scenes and characters here, cut quick as if in one big conversation with another, gets at the zany, convoluted, hazily druggy vibe of the film. As Anderson makes his way through a bunch of films chronicling America in the 20th century, this is of course the one dealing with hallowed material (a minor Pychon novel, but still Pynchon) and the fallout from a hallowed era -- while Mad Men's song choices point it toward the encroaching end of the '60s and the fallout of the '70s, Inherent Vice is just a bit ahead on the calendar. Sly & The Family Stone's "I Want To Take You Higher" was the main song in the trailer, and it's one of the single best music moments of the year. That's a song that can get you amped up if you hear it alone, but in this context it shudders. It's the sound of the unraveling, loopy America depicted in Inherent Vice.
The film itself is more sprawling and maybe a little slower than the trailer would suggest. It's never boring, though, always colorful and bizarre and idiosyncratic. But it does travel at more of a lope than that trailer would suggest, more of a confusedly steady pulse through an increasingly weird zig-zag of a story. To that end, Can's "Vitamin C" is the perfect opening song, clattering to life as Shasta pulls away from Doc's street and he walks away, the big neon Inherent Vice logo flashing onto the screen, covering him. The song persists in the background, like a lot of songs do in this movie -- again, that druggy, loopy pulse. The thing about Inherent Vice is it balances this gonzo degradation of America coming into the '70s with a pang of nostalgia. There are characters here that'd certainly miss the '60s, that would still believe in that dream. So there's some really poignant music in here, too, from the sunburnt guitar lines in Johnny Greenwood's score to one scene in particular backed by Neil Young's "Journey Into The Past." It's a flashback to the halcyon days of Doc's relationship with Shasta, with them running through a rainy street looking for drugs and then collapsing into a storefront to kiss. But that's tarnished nostalgia, because we know where their relationship went and we know the '60s didn't keep running. Whatever journey into the past Anderson's currently on himself (this, though far different in tone, is his third 20th century period piece in a row following There Will Be Blood and The Master), it's a rewarding one: the images and sounds of Inherent Vice combine into a gorgeously broken vision of a lost American era.
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1. True Detective
When something has the out-of-nowhere, meteoric rise of fervent internet attention and speculation that True Detective did, there's bound to be some blowback. As the show's eight episodes unfolded, and in the wake of it ending, critics argued its depiction of women was misogynistic, that the show took Rust Cohle's hack philosophy too seriously, that there was a lot of depressive flash covering up tired substance. This is another instance where I was sold from the first episode, and was totally willing to let this warped show engulf me for its entire run, perhaps aside from a mildly disappointing ending. (It really says something about where this show took my expectations that the relief and surprise of a happy ending somehow qualified as "mildly disappointing.") Like Fargo and The Leftovers, True Detective was another of 2014's new shows that arrived with a very clear idea of itself, even more so than either of the former. There are all sorts of reasons for this, between the fact that Cary Fukunaga directed every episode with crazy impressive grace and precision in the dilapidated Louisiana setting, and that showrunner/creator Nic Pizzolatto wrote every episode himself. But the reason True Detective sits at #1 this year is, of course, that T Bone Burnett's music supervision also played a fundamental role, giving us a handful of brilliant soundtrack moments.
One thing has stayed true since February: The moment that really hooked me on True Detective, the moment where I sat there and unequivocally thought, "Yeah, this is how TV should be made," was when the Black Angels' "Young Men Dead" kicked in right after 2012 Rust -- Matthew McConaughey in steady McConaissance, with grungey long hair and smoking inside and daytime sixpacks of Lone Star -- tells the two detectives to "start asking the right fucking questions." The riff of "Young Men Dead" never fails to impress, even as many years as it's been around now: It always gets the blood boiling, or conversely always brings a chill to your skin. It's the kind of song that just says shit is going to go down, and doesn't wait for you to get prepared for it before it's scuzzy downbeat crashes in. Part of the weird thing about all the attention that was paid to True Detective is that this built up in only eight weeks; it wasn't like that at all for the first few episodes. When this first episode aired and this "Young Men Dead" moment happened, it was just a gut punch notifying you of this vicious new show with two movie stars hanging around.
The atmosphere of dread was well-maintained throughout the subsequent seven episodes, occasionally veering towards the hallucinogenic, playing at Rust's history of drug abuse as well as the eerier, more mythological portents that hung around the story. There was that opening theme, the Handsome Family's bleary "Far From Any Road" playing over all sorts of creepy shadow images of the characters and their landscape. Unsettling discoveries were accompanied by unsettling, otherworldly songs, like the 13th Floor Elevators' "Kingdom Of Heaven when Rust finds the church mural at the end of the second episode, or the Bosnian Rainbows' "Eli" when he looks through the school at the end of the fifth. Over the course of the season, the music selections ranged from this side of things, to drunkenly down and out country, to visceral waves of id, all of it mixing together to sum up the universe True Detective had sketched out. The fourth episode alone packed in more variety in its music use than most shows do in general: a plaintive sequence set to Lucinda Williams' "Are You Alright?" leads to the Melvins' "A History Of Bad Men" at a biker club, leads to Wu Tang Clan's "Clan In Da Front" and Grinderman's "Honey Bee" bracketing that still totally insane tracking shot that closed the episode.
I remember reading somewhere, at some point, that the music in True Detective was "too cool" or something. That the choices were more reflective of an overly savvy music supervisor than they were of the songs that people would actually be listening to. That's insane! This is a damn good TV show, with damn good music in it. Its music choices might not have been totally real to our world, but they're very real to True Detective's. Considering the show was always a surreal, disturbing portrait of America's fringe, of the darker corners we'd rather look away from, everything from the shoegaze drones of "Eli" to the sludgy stomp of "Honey Bee" to that first kick in the face courtesy of the Black Angels was masterfully curated, a key piece in what True Detective achieved.
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