From The Daily Beast:

A Bloody Good CD

Each week, The Daily Beast scours the cultural landscape to choose three top picks.

This week, the Twilight soundtrack debuts, outsider artist James Castle gets his first retrospective, and author Barbara Ehrenreich takes on positive thinking in America.

Twilight: New Moon, the next installment of the wildly popular vampire series does not reach theaters until November 20, but the soundtrack was released this week and has already rocketed to the #2 slot on the Billboard charts (behind Michael Buble, who is dominating for a second week in a row).

The soundtrack, put together by Hollywood's most in-demand music supervisor Alexandra Patsavas (known for selecting and gold-plating the songs in The O.C. and Grey's Anatomy), has been a big buzz subject in the music industry for the last few months. A spot on the album—which is sure to become as huge a cultural phenomenon as the film—became the most coveted gig in music, and every major label campaigned to have their artists selected.

Now, the wait is over that the anointed acts have been crowned—Patsavas chose a primarily indie rock mix, with songs from bigger bands such as Muse, the Killers, Grizzly Bear, and Radiohead's Thom Yorke, and tracks from lesser-knowns artists like Hurricane Bell, Sea Wolf, and Lykke Li.

The L.A. Times notes the record's melancholic tones, calling it "music-to-get-sad-to, definitely," but also notes that "Patsavas has put together a collection of songs that captures the drama of young love without drowning in it." Listen to "Roslyn" a lovely and haunting New Moon tune from Bon Iver's Justin Vernon and St. Vincent's Annie Clark.