Like most of the stuff on Bloodshot Records, the soundtrack features a variety of cutting-edge, countrified-Americannibalized music, an amalgam of cast-iron country and wide-open, gothic, aggressive, strange, funky, and fanciful influences.
Bloodshot artists like Neko Case and the Blood Oranges appear, as do pop geniuses the Pernice Brothers, Jimmie Dale Gilmore and his Texas buddies Joe Ely and Butch Hancock (a.k.a. the Flatlanders), and Vic Chesnutt. Other highlights: Ryan Adams hitchhikes down Dylan's Highway 61 on 2000's "To Be Young (Is to Be Sad, Is to Be High)," and Freakwater wades waist-deep in the Louvin Brothers' oft-covered classic "When I Stop Dreaming." But Jay Farrar, of Uncle Tupelo and Son Volt, is really the cake beneath the icing on this collection. He composed a series of instrumentals for the film that here run between the other songs.
In the context of this film, there's nothing here that isn't haunting, vaguely unsettling, equal parts toasty hearth and frozen wasteland. It's that rare soundtrack that is wonderful by itself, but manages to create an entirely new emotional environment once the movie has faded from memory.
