David Lynch
Crazy Clown Time
(Shock)
It takes notorious filmmaker David Lynch a dozen songs to admit he’s stalking someone on his first proper venture into music, but that won’t be a revelation to anyone who’s seen his movies or listened to the rest of the album. Over a dragging 70 minutes, Lynch adapts his trademark creepiness for this other medium. It would at least be fascinating as a train wreck if it weren’t so slow-moving and repetitive throughout. But it is: Lynch loves all things atmospheric and disturbing, and Crazy Clown Time lays it on so thick that it becomes dull.
The opening ‘Pinky’s Dream’ establishes a thirst for bluesy grit and reverbed twang, using guest Karen O’s whoop and purr to create something in between Sonic Youth’s ‘Kool Thing’ (mostly in her singing) and The Shangri-La’s ‘Leader of the Pack’ (mostly in the doomed road setting). From there, Lynch covers much of the same ground singing lead himself, although his exact methods shift. He summons twitchy dance-pop on ‘Good Day Today’ – one of several tracks where he warbles through a vocoder – and a soundtrack-y simmer on the title track.
His unaltered squeak comes out to play on ‘So Glad’, which relishes being free of another person, and ‘I Know’, which sounds like Daniel Johnston covering Chris Isaac. ‘These Are My Friends’ and ‘Football Game’ paint mundane Americana as the stuff of hell, while ‘Night Bell With Lightning’ twangs like a spaghetti western score. ‘Noah’s Arc’ could be a remix of a hostage demand or stalker phone call, and one can easily imagine Dennis Hopper’s Blue Velvet character Frank Booth doing the vocals. The rambled ‘Speed Roadster’ is more cringe-worthy than most and yet ‘Stone’s Gone Up’ is somehow poppy, coming off like Kraftwerk or Devo saddled with a stalker fetish. And ‘She Rise Up’ makes for a slow-burn finish.
But the big roadblock is the would-be centrepiece ‘Strange and Unproductive Thinking’, on which Lynch indulges in a spoken-word vocoder rant that dovetails into his beloved transcendental meditation but doesn’t stop there. It’s arguably tongue in cheek – he starts musing on oral health by the end – but at seven-plus minutes and with its metronomic loop ticking away, it’s more of a slog than any one track should be. Not that any of this will deter curious fans of his, mind.
Doug Wallen
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