Memories of Cellophane“The Last Journey” floats through the hazy air on David Lynch’s latest collaboration with Texas-born singer Christabel. Even if you’re not all that familiar with Lynch’s work, or the overall aesthetic with which the filmmaker’s surname has been associated (and often misused), the album title alludes to the thinly veiled, nostalgic nature of music more obsessed with dreams, memories, and suggestive scene-setting than with unravelling mysteries. Christabel has collaborated frequently with Lynch since appearing on the album. Inland Empire soundtrack and played FBI agent Tammy Preston Twin Peaks: return – likens it to “mood music” but clarifies that it “doesn’t create a mood, it reflects your mood.” You come away not understanding what happened, but still enthralled, having served its purpose, more acutely aware of your environment and what’s going on inside your own head.
Lynch and Christabel’s first album in 2011 This trainwas a fairly conventional, yet mesmerizing, effort in the subgenre Lynch favored, Julee Cruise’s 1989 album, The 1989, produced by frequent Lynch collaborator Angelo Badalamenti. Drifting in the Night – contributed to the establishment of Memories of Cellophane It’s sparser, it’s almost beatless, it’s more experimental, it’s more dreamIt’s less pop in nature, and more expanded by the passage of time. Still, the intimate dance between Lynch’s airy synths and Christabel’s angelic vocals is captivating, and the production beautifully diffuses the bluesy, confessional elements of Christabel’s earlier work without obscuring its power. Floating fragments come into focus above the overlapping, stitched and inverted layers of her voice, blurring boundaries and allowing the everyday to bleed into otherworldliness. words for that.
At times, the arrangements are so vague that you get caught up in their vortex. But they move along tenderly, vulnerable, and at least cinematic. On “The Sky Falls,” Lynch’s synths soften the feeble resignation of Christabel’s words, barely understandable except for the reference to death, making them seem somehow ethereal rather than dejected. When he switches to ringing, resonant guitar, it has a strangely down-to-earth effect, highlighting the descriptive details of “You Know the Rest” and making the sensuality of “Two Lovers Kiss” even more palpable. But the record is at its most far-reaching when it includes contributions from the late Badalamenti, whose grandiose synthesizers enhance the wonderful (and decidedly unerotic) romanticism of “So Much Love,” and composer Dean Hurley’s bass and drums turn “The Answers to the Questions” into not just an ominously shimmering masterpiece but an undeniable centerpiece.
Memories of Cellophane Lynch supposedly had the vision during a nighttime walk through the woods, during which he saw a bright light rising from the tall trees. The vision appears in the somber highlight, “Reflections in a Blade,” and propels the action’s climax. If you look closely, you can almost decipher that climax: “The darkness didn’t hide her for long/She took a breath and ran/She sprinted to the back of the house/The flashlight light danced like a shining knife blade.” It shouldn’t be a spoiler that it turns out to be a dream, but the dream is vivid and violent enough to make you question the reality around you. “She thought they had a bond/An unshakeable bond/But was it too good to be true?” Christabel wonders in a wave of profound clarity on “The Answers to the Questions.” But when she wakes from the dream, she is overwhelmed by the more-than-human connection between the two of them. The final track is titled “Sublime Eternal Love.” Whether this ending can be called Lynchian is up for debate. But it’s not obscurity or strangeness that enlivens this collaborative album, but a gentle beauty that resonates in the silence that lingers in its wake.
