Tracklist: “Pinky’s Dream” * “Good Day Today” * “So Glad” * “Noah’s Ark” * “Football Game” * “I Know” * “Strange and Unproductive Thinking” * “The Night Bell with Lightning” * “Stone’s Gone Up” * “Crazy Clown Time” * “These Are My Friends” * “Speed Roadster” * “Movin’ On” * “She Rise Up”
David Lynch – “Crazy Clown Time” – Viva Music Album Review:
The debut album from world-famous director David Lynch, if we conveniently close an eye to his work in the soundtrack of his own movies, “Crazy Clown Time” has been out for two weeks already, being released on Nov-07 with Sunday Best Records/Play It Again Sam, but we think it takes at least two weeks – just to be lenient with such an important issue – of constant listening to the album in order to make sure you’re not that kind of sloppy listener who misses the right influences and tone of the album. While it is true that the jingle the name of David Lynch carries about it is sufficient to get your ears pricked from the word go, it is also true that such an album is worthy of consideration from a number of perspectives that can only enhance, and never diminish, the merits of the album.
Two of the songs from the album are not novel auditions; “Good Day Today” and “I Know”, with their sequin-harsh surface, were released just one year ago, not a real appetizer, but a good standpoint for the work that was going to be unveiled. With basically only good reviews (“it transfers something of Lynch’s uncanny cinema to the musical medium”, “everyday, avant-garde vision” are some examples of conceptual criticism of the album), “Crazy Clown Time” is set, as the title well puts it, in its own, special time. It is not unlikely that the album be less well received in the electropop, ambient-loving crowd, because it is carried through straight and long conduits of blues-y and melancholy melody, but in a firm coating of electronic, temperature resistant material.
“Pinky’s Dream”, the opening track that features vocals from Karen Lee Orzolek (better known as The Yeah Yeah Yeahs‘ Karen O) induces a cool that is at the same time cinematic and minimal. Verbally pertinent for an opening track (there’s vent of pathfinding and watchfulness), “Pinky’s Dream” carries on atmosphere and anticipates it its melodic knit the outburst of “Good Day Today”, which sounds like a delayed trance, not deprived of its individuality, and resorting to oracular language. On the same topic of positivity, “So Glad” sounds tongue-in-cheek in its outside makeup, but deeper veins of sensibility throb behind that. With the same slo mo tempo of previous tracks, combining the soundtrack for a funeral and a victory dance in a very unsettling manner. (more…)