Dec. 07, 2011 - Issue #842: Hroses
Crazy Clown Time
David Lynch {recordings_bands_mg} Crazy Clown Time {/recordings_bands_mg}
PIAS, 2011
2
Full disclosure: I'm a pretty big fan of David Lynch the filmmaker. But that just makes it more painful to have to say Crazy Clown Time, Lynch the musician's first full release after a inexplicably dropping a couple of songs last year, offers mostly creeping mood and not much else.As pop music—which, at its heart, seems to be what its trying to be—it works intermittently, such as opener "Pinky's Dream," where guest vocals by Karen O meet a propulsive sort of urgency in the echoing guitars and driving drums. Same with "Good Day Today," where lapping synths play against Lynch's vocoder vocals, blending together into something at once trancelike and unsettling.
But mostly Crazy Clown Time just coasts on a somewhat-skewed vibe for its close to 80-minute runtime, a long chain of whispered or processed vocals, programmed drums, slowly quivering synths. The mood created by all those combinations conjures up a common Lynch image, of high-beams tracing across a highway at night, scanning the darkness but finding little to remember. vueweekly.com comments: powered by Disqus
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