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Album reviews Music

David Lynch

Rating: NNN


As a filmmaker, David Lynch is a celebrated, singular visionary who owes more to visual art than to traditional filmic influences. Movies like Eraserhead and Inland Empire feel cinematically unprecedented.

Sound is integral to these films, so Lynch’s recent focus on music is not surprising. It follows that imagery is equally important to his music, and his menacingly minimal (and bassy) second solo album is like a film without pictures: a sleepy late-night desert road trip of dissonant electric guitar riffs, bluesy warbling and eerie effects. The songs are character-based, and the lyrics are visceral and descriptive, particularly on a cover of Bob Dylan’s The Ballad Of Hollis Brown about a desperate farmer who murders his family.

Although making unprecedented music is a tall order in 2013, The Big Dream reconfigures the perplexing aesthetic into a Lynchian sound, like he did on 2011’s Crazy Clown Time. It’s an album of spare and precise beauty, and when it was over I really wanted to see the film.

Top track: I Want You

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