Crazy Clown Time
4/5
Just what is eccentric Hollywood director David Lynch doing releasing an album? In some ways, the spooky auteur recording an electronic music record is a surprise. In others, not so much. The charging blues riff of opener ‘Pinky’s Dream’ – haunting vocals courtesy of Karen O from the Yeah Yeah Yeahs – conjures images of a furious James Hurley flying down the roads in Twin Peaks, just as the title track echoes ‘Fire Walk With Me’ in its sordid, carnal groans and loosely strung-together narrative of ‘girls with ripped shirts’. The internal monologue about voyeurism and lost love in ‘Speed Roadster’, backed by a minimal beat, recalls Lynch’s 1986 film Blue Velvet.
Crazy Clown Time is at once eerie and provocative, but also hypnotic and futuristic, especially on single ‘Good Day Today’, in which Lynch’s vocals sound bionic, and gunshots are interspersed with an upbeat track that apes Brad Carter’s funky house single ‘Morning Always Comes Too Soon’. The surrealist director warrants his own adjective – ‘Lynchian’ – because he makes movies like nobody else, and his music follows a similar path.
