If you've ever thought of director David Lynch as being "weird," suspend that thought for a moment. That weirdness-- the visceral, surrealistic imagery and fragmented plots in his movies-- is exactly what we as viewers want from him. You probably like it weird now and then. I do too. It's what thrills us, confuses us, and keeps us coming back for more.
One of the elements that defines Lynch's films is the way he uses music, especially music from the 1950s and early 60s. Seemingly innocuous songs are set in relief against scenes of violence or desperation in ways that reveal some latent passion that might be hard to hear on oldies radio. The era is crucial: Slowdances and big-bad-wolf blues are styles whose tensions are born of repression. Making your sexual desires known was not much of an option in the 1950s, so the music worked via metaphor and concealment and, as a result, quaked with subterranean energy that had no safe outlet. Lynch's scenes provide that outlet. When he uses a song as soundtrack, he transforms it.
Music in his movies arrives at high-water moments. Dennis Hopper does himself up in lipstick to Roy Orbison's "In Dreams" before assaulting poor Kyle MacLachlan in Blue Velvet, Naomi Watts and Laura Harring sob to Rebekah del Rio's performance of Orbison's "Crying" in Mulholland Drive, and Jack Nance, saddled with his horrible alien baby at the edge of domestic sanity in Eraserhead, is serenaded by a tiny, grotesque woman inside his radiator. In these scenes, the music is used in the same way that we as listeners often use it: to pump ourselves up, to give us space to emote, or to find solace. Lynch's sense of music is intuitive that way, and probably one of the most plainly sympathetic aspects of his movies.
Crazy Clown Time, while technically a proper debut full-length, is far from the first time Lynch has had a hand in the actual writing and performing of music. He was making noises with Alan Splet as early as Eraserhead, and has done soundtrack work on nearly every movie he's directed through 2006's Inland Empire. He recorded a pleasant-enough "soundscape" titled The Air Is On Fire in 2007, and in 2009, he released the Fox Bat Strategy EP, a collaboration featuring musicians with whom he'd worked since Fire Walk With Me, including deceased vocalist Dave Jaurequi, to whom the record was dedicated. And before these, he produced and wrote lyrics for two airy makeout albums by singer Julee Cruise in the late 1980s and early 90s which ought to be studied by all young women who try to sing like undead phone-sex operators.
But Crazy Clown Time is largely a solo project, and most of its material is what you might expect from an album made by David Lynch: tense, repetitive bluesy music permeated by reverb and echo. The remaining few songs-- including the record's first single, "Good Day Today"-- are not. These other songs are disco, sort of: dark, mid-tempo electronic pop. Karen O sings in places (most prominently on the album's standout opening track, "Pinky's Dream"), but the bulk of the album is actually sung by Lynch through vocoders and other modulating effects. (If you've seen Lynch's movies but never heard him speak, you are depriving yourself a harmless treat. Here.) His lyrics are also more or less what you might expect: simple, fragmented, and a bit dull on the page, but threateningly voiced in his high, twanging pitch.
Unfortunately, none of these songs actually feel like songs. Only a few have choruses or any significant chord changes. Instead, they're set pieces, which makes sense: Lynch's films often seem to be more about luxuriating in his atmosphere than about following his plots, and that carries over to this music as well. But as unfair as this observation might seem to Lynch as a musician, the question I end up asking after listening to Crazy Clown Time is: Hasn't he already accomplished all this in his movies more successfully? In light of his filmography, the album feels familiar to the point of redundancy. Why does he stop with seven minutes of lecturing in a robot voice about how to think positively? Couldn't the album use more abstraction-heavy lectures about positive thinking conveyed in robotic voices? I think so. But maybe I only think that because I come to Lynch for surprise and disruption.
It's been five years since Lynch made Inland Empire. From what I can tell, he spends a lot of his time in the spotlight eagerly promoting Transcendental Meditation. He recently designed a nightclub in Paris. So, alright. My purely speculative guess is that Crazy Clown Time is just part of a temporary break from feature filmmaking-- not as heinous as some vanity projects, but an album that will satisfy some personal need, be minorly exciting to fans who will follow him wherever he goes, and end up ignored by both parties in time. Anyone who hasn't seen his movies would benefit from seeing almost all of them before listening to it.
