Lynch is a member of that most elite of societies, the artist become adjective. The sixty-four-year-old director’s name conjures a specific universe of images and sound like no other and although this is his first foray proper into the medium of electronic music, it’s a masterful accomplishment. It sounds exactly as you would expect, almost as it must, although it already existed somewhere in the ether, waiting to be trapped like some joyous and unsettling dream.
Lynch and engineer Dean Hurley have been working in the studio together for years and this is the result, an album as bright and viscous as cherry jam; ripe with sugaryness and vividly tart. It shares the perverted dichotomies of his film making, the mesmerisingly mundane vying with the salacious and sinister. In essence it presents us with a dark, fragmentary, hypereality of analogue drums and bass in a sea of digital manipulation.
Shifting from languorous and limpid to manic, motorik and mechanical, the production is as meticulous as the sound design in his movies. Amidst the darkness there are ecstatic passages and stream of consciousness lyrics wrapped up in exuberant childish buoyancy. The influence of long-time collaborator Badalamenti is there, just perceptible, like curtains fluttering at a window. From the pastoral to the industrial via recognisable tremelo guitars and heavily treated vocals, in places it’s reminiscent of Iggy Pop and James Williamson’s ‘Kill City’, in others, it’s like The White Stripes on Mogadon. Beautifully beguiling.
8/10
Words by ANNA WILSON
