David Lynch
Crazy Clown Time

THE REVIEW

Shocking and unexpected, the news that the versatile and brilliant American director David Lynch (also devoted to painting, writing, and various arts) wanted to venture into music to demonstrate his talent in every artistic field, both aroused my curiosity and made me skeptical. The release of the single "Good Day Today", in fact, had left me quite bewildered: a bland and dark song, 2011 trip-hop nostalgia, Bristol sound polaroids remixed with eurodance slowbeat and glimmers of light in an obsessive tangle. A song not bad, but one that slides over you without leaving much. 

The disappointment, however, is shattered at times, inserting the CD into the player: the opener, "Pinky's Dream", which leaves the voice to the always splendid Karen O, has the maneuvers of a nightmare and fascinates. Yeah Yeah Yeahs on acid and oppressive shadows. Some glimpses of dream pop suffering from tuberculosis and a lot of sensuality.  

The title track distorts a Horace Andy cadence to draw almost blues-like boundaries, almost poignant in its tangle of obsessive sounds abandoned to the oblivion of existence. In "Speed Roaster", a typically Lynchian narrative, of love with psychic turmoil and murder included, translates into a faint and choked singing over an almost dub carpet, seeming like a transition piece, but it’s the classic infernal vortex opening beneath your feet. 

"I Know" dominates the scene in its desperate dithering over a truly remarkable musical base that embraces you with a knife hidden behind the back. Pure delirium of hoarse emotion, manifested as one of the peaks of this mysterious object called an album. Actually, not an album, a journey. A psychic journey of imaginary abuses and solemn vertices where even dead times can open an abyss towards infinity.

An unreviewable record, made of ingenious solutions and relaxed moments of apparent calm that explode into infernal Dantean circles.

"So Glad", even more tenebrous, perfectly embodies the concept of "Hell": a non-physical hell, but mental, where dust and ghosts project in front of you in the absolute nothingness of this night in which Lynch always manages to make you collapse, while "Noha's Ark" slows down the rhythm and then picks it up, always obsessive, always repeated and smoky, until it culminates in a goosebump-inducing voice. 

A filmic record, an abyssal journey, musically imperfect, contrary to the cinematic perfection of his films, but tremendously evocative and, in its way, irresistible.  To be listened to in the dark, with a cigarette constantly lit, it travels between genius and the suspicion that it's just an auteur's whim. But it's worth listening to, living it, and enjoying it, before the answer to our doubts arrives too soon. Or never at all, as we're sucked into the blue box of "Mulholland Drive".