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October’s a month that sounds like British folk music to me. A little melancholy, a little eerie, very melodic. So my earworm at the moment is Paul Giovanni’s entire sound track to The Wicker Man. The real one of 1973 vintage, that is, not that Neil LaBute thing I have no interest in seeing. (No cheesy songs, no Nekkid Booty-Slapping Dance, no snail porn, no cross-dressing Christopher Lee? That’s just a straw man.) Especially that pseudopagan fertility anthem all the residents of Summerisle sing as they [PLOT POINT REDACTED], to drown out the screams.
The most delightful thing about this sound track is that, taken separately from the movie, it almost passes for some The Thistle & Shamrock sampler, if a bit showtuney and not suitably obsessed with “authenticity.” There’s just enough off-kilterness in the high-pitched children’s choirs, the forced jollity, the otherworldly threats of bagpipe abuse, and the just-barely-there hints of ineptness in some of the performances that whisper of the sort of cultish sincerity that only low-budget British productions seem able to reliably generate. And no, the cover versions of “Willow’s Song” by the Sneaker Pimps and Faith & the Muse don’t come close to this particular unquantifiable quality.
