Cellophane Recollections, David Lynch’s newest musical collaboration with Texas-born singer Chrystabell, drifts by in a haze. Even should you’re not too conversant in Lynch’s work or your complete aesthetic the filmmaker’s surname has been related to (and sometimes misused), the album title hints on the thinly nostalgic nature of its music, which is preoccupied with desires, reminiscence, and suggestive scene-setting greater than any type of solvable thriller. Chrystabell – who has steadily collaborated with Lynch since contributing to the Inland Empire soundtrack and performed FBI agent Tammy Preston in Twin Peaks: The Return – has likened it to “temper music,” however clarified, “not that it creates temper, however extra that it displays your personal.” You come out of it uncertain what’s occurred however mesmerized nonetheless, and if it serves its goal, with a keener consciousness of your surroundings and headspace.
Lynch and Chrystabell’s first album collectively, 2011’s This Prepare, was a relatively typical but transfixing providing in a subgenre that Lynch – along with his and frequent collaborator Angelo Badalamenti’s manufacturing in Julee Cruise’s 1989 album Floating Into the Evening – helped set up. In contrast, the dreampop of Cellophane Recollections is sparser, largely beatless, and extra experimental – extra dream, much less pop, basically – as if expansed by the passage of time. Nonetheless, the intimate dance between Lynch’s ethereal synths and Chrystabell’s angelic vocals stays intriguing; the manufacturing has a method of superbly diffusing the bluesy, confessional factor of Chrystabell’s prior work with out overshadowing its energy. Floating atop the overlapping, stitched-up, and reversed layers of her voice, fragments develop into the main target, boundaries are blurred, and the mundane bleeds into the otherworldly. If solely there was a phrase for that.
At occasions, the preparations are a bit too amorphous to maintain you hooked within the swirl of all of it. However they’re tender, susceptible, and, if nothing else, cinematically paced. In ‘The Sky Falls’, Lynch’s synths soften the frail resignation of Chrystabell’s phrases, barely decipherable besides once they point out loss of life, into one thing ethereal relatively than downcast. When he switches to a twangy, reverb-drenched guitar, it has a unusually grounding impact, shedding gentle on the expository particulars of ‘You Know the Relaxation’ and rendering the sensuality of ‘Two Lovers Kiss’ all of the extra palpable. However the document is at its most sweeping when it consists of contributions from the late Badalamenti, whose epic synths heighten the wondrous (and decidedly unerotic) romanticism of ‘So A lot Love’, in addition to composer Dean Hurley, whose bass and drums flip ‘The Solutions to the Questions’ into not solely an ominously lurching standout however the plain centerpiece.
Cellophane Recollections supposedly got here to Lynch in a imaginative and prescient throughout a nighttime stroll in a forest, the place a brilliant gentle turned seen over the tops of tall timber. That imaginative and prescient manifests within the brooding spotlight ‘Reflections in a Blade’, driving the climax of the motion, which you’ll nearly decipher should you look laborious sufficient: “Darkness wouldn’t conceal her for lengthy/ She took a breath and ran/ She ran as quick as she may to the again of the home/ The sunshine of the flashlight dancing like a shiny knife blade.” It ought to be no spoiler that it seems to be a dream, although one vivid and violent sufficient to depart you questioning the fact round it. “She thought they’d a bond/ An unshakable bond/ However was it too good to be true?” Chrystabell wonders, in a wave of profound lucidity, on ‘The Solutions to the Questions’. However as soon as she wakes from that dream, she is floored by a connection that transcends two human beings; the ultimate observe known as ‘Chic Everlasting Love’. Whether or not you would name the conclusion Lynchian is up for debate. Nevertheless it’s the mild magnificence, not the paradox or weirdness, that animates this collaborative album, echoing by way of the silence left in its wake.
