Soundtrack Review: Talladega Nights

Comedies are often characterized by music that accentuates the visual jokes as well as the dialogue. It takes just the right kind of tune to create a punchline, which can be infinitely more difficult than creating a dramatic mood through a more serious melody. With such credits as "Hollywood Homicide" and "Confessions of a Dangerous Mind" to his name, it seems that composer Alex Wurman knows how to adapt to any genre. When you take into consideration that Wurman also did "Anchorman: The Legend of Ron Burgundy," another Will Ferrell comedy, it becomes evident that he came into "Talladega Nights: The Ballad of Ricky Bobby" with the proper experience behind him.

Wurman himself has said, "When I'm scoring for Will Ferrell, I'm scoring for the character," which just goes to prove that the two are a complementary match. The "Talladega Nights" score has the perfect match for the racecar driver Ricky Bobby, played by Will Ferrell. Each track has a dramatic overstatement that is so over the top and chock full of American hero kind of theme music that it is highly effective as the essential comic touch. Any normal racing movie might have high-octane thrill ride music, but "Talladega Nights" is pure camp. With retro cowboy guitar meeting bold and proud trumpet flares, the score is as amusing as the character and the premise of the movie.

As a whole, the tracks are all influenced by the music in old style westerns that today can have a certain absurd campy quality in retrospect. This score captures that oddity and applies it to the world of NASCAR and its stock car heroes. The melodramatic comic subtlety of Wurman's work on this is very well done and suits the character just as he intends it to with an underlying satire to further drive home the fun. The fact that Wurman can find such a fitting sound for a comedy speaks much to his talent. The music that makes a comedy that much funnier and yet goes largely unnoticed by the audience as an almost subliminal comedic device is a hard thing to tune so finely.

While "Talladega" is a well-made score and does a great job suiting itself to the material of the film as well as its star, it is not the kind of music most would want to own without taking particular interest in it because of the film. The cool western sound has some action and excessively dramatic elements, all of which are great but also too varied. The pace and beat of the score changes often and several of the tracks are extremely short since this is all built to accommodate scenes and not function simultaneously as a body of work independent from its media. This is not music you would normally put on to enjoy because it stands on its own very well, but rather because you took to it in the film and can associate it with those humorous moments. Out of 10 stars, I'd give this CD a 5.