David Lynch, the transcendental meditator and itinerant Eagle Scout who believes that a daily routine allows the mind to travel unfettered, has at pivotal moments of his artistic career been inspired by the limpid light or electric spark of visions, whether the manicured lawns and picket fences which sprung up one day as he listened to the Bobby Vinton hit ‘Blue Velvet’ or the image of a severed ear in a field which provided a portal to his film of the same name, or the hot roof of a car which conjured when touched the first iconic Red Room scene from Twin Peaks replete with drapes, chevron flooring and backwards digressions. His new album Cellophane Memories with frequent collaborator Chrystabell also hails from a vision, which he experienced during ‘a nighttime walk through a forest of tall trees, over the tops of which he saw a bright light’ which turned out to be the lilt of Chrystabell’s voice and disclosed a mysterious secret.
That might sound fairly rote for Lynch but Chrystabell is at this point not only entrenched within his artistic world but part of the firmament. Having met in the late nineties, she sang the indelible ‘Polish Poem’ which bookends Inland Empire and Lynch served as the co-writer and producer of her records This Train and Somewhere in the Nowhere before she played the FBI agent Tammy Preston in the third season of Twin Peaks, a divisive character for some fans who serves as a jerky third wheel while cracking the fourth wall in typically Lynchian fashion. Chrystabell subsequently worked with other producers over a trio of albums which foregrounded her voice and even flecked across the glitter ball of disco, but these songs for all of their rockabilly twang, woozy synths and propulsive beats still felt grounded in a dreamy pop with an ethereal haunt which despite all of the grind seems indivisible from her nature.
The obvious touchstone for Lynch’s own musical career will always be his work with Julee Cruise and Angelo Badalamenti, particularly Cruise’s debut album Floating into the Night which furnished the theme song for Twin Peaks as well as the standouts ‘Rockin’ Back Inside My Heart’ and ‘Mysteries of Love’, which begat the whole enterprise when Lynch desired This Mortal Coil’s cover of ‘Song to the Siren’ for Blue Velvet but found it prohibitively expensive.
After the bristling electronics and crackling blues of his own solo efforts Crazy Clown Time and The Big Dream, where he worked alongside the composer and eerie sound designer Dean Hurley, for these Cellophane Memories he returns to more dreamy and wistful fare, producing and arranging the record and playing synthesizers and guitar, accompanied briefly by Hurley on synthesizers, drums and bass while Badalamenti, who died in December of 2022 at the age of 85 years old, returns for one final embrace as the familiar rapture and disquiet of his keys feature via a couple of salvaged instrumentals.
More than the ample backing music however, Cellophane Memories is defined by Chrystabell’s layered voice as it laps less like waves than the rustling of leaves in that forest, covering and cosseting or whipping sideways with a hint of menace. Creating a patchwork of not only sound but meaning as it frays and overlaps while she repeats key phrases, her voice might seem simply spellbinding at first but on repeat listens she appears to sing with a surveying eye, those layered vocals offering varying impressions of moments as they occur, both scanning and interpreting even as she unfolds typically abstruse lyrics.
Take the opening song ‘She Knew’ for instance which seems to fracture around the repetition of the line ‘She had been swimming’. An otherwise straightforward depiction of a chance encounter as eligible eyes meet from across opposite sides of the pool, with a sad departure and the emotional rupture of a connection foregone and the thought of never seeing that person again, something seems to flicker as the singer recounts in the past perfect tense that swim and falters over the half-eaten remains of ‘a lunch she had brought from home’. Something more furtive is underfoot as Badalamenti’s synths swell and a sense of knowing, through cooing repetitions and ellipses, gives way to the endless tears of a timeless cry, the act of stepping out of the pool as though playing on loop as covert lovers beckon in their absence.
The vocals on ‘The Sky Falls’ are jazzier while ‘You Know the Rest’ is more bluesy, as the humming overtones of Lynch’s guitar vie with a slack and seductive patter, the spatter of rain and a full garage on a warm but overcast evening as Chrystabell plays the vamp. Lines and images stick out like a sore thumb, spurs to memory like the dinner of ‘meat and potatoes’ here or the refrain on ‘The Answers to the Questions’ where an ‘unshakeable bond’ might be ‘too good to be true’.
Back with Badalamenti on ‘So Much Love’, those sustained keys which land somewhere between trepidation and elegy are redolent of ‘Falling’ or ‘Mysteries of Love’ with its windblown candle and languorous yet liminal romance. ‘Two Lovers Kiss’ which vocally continues in the same vein is a kind of nocturne as a couple consummates their commingling, with a countryfied air almost like those Elvis at Sun recordings given the moonlit reverb of Lynch’s guitar playing.
The lurching drums of ‘The Answers to the Questions’ portend a bit of rockabilly swagger, which does emerge but at a molasses or syrupy pace like a waltz or some other slow dance. ‘With Small Animals’ is a smudged vision which ebbs and flows and buries the bluesy ‘Cyprus Avenue’ image of rainbows and sunshine in a woman’s hair, while ‘Reflections in a Blade’ is even more murky, characterised by an electronic treatment from Hurley which sounds a bit like the ‘ominous whooshing’ from the third season of Twin Peaks. The vocals sustain the ambiance, as Chrystabell outlines a desperate game of hide and seek where the light of a flashlight dances ‘like a shiny knife blade’ before the intended victim wakes up screaming and laughing, for thank God it was only a dream.
Then ‘Dance of Light’ cuts through the clouds, through aching yet transportive chords and circling vocals which seem especially enchanted for their transparent dewiness, their honeyed fragrance and tender silveriness. Cellophane Memories draws to a close with an evocation of the sublime, through a Burkean or Kantian understanding of the concept whereby the sublime object might prompt feelings of terror or defy human comprehension, yet here through the trembling and crying of the lyrics and the tremulous rise and fall of celestial synths the equation resolves as it so often does for Lynch, in the limp yet steadfast arms of love.
That’s beautiful Angelo, with a shoutout to Dean while Chrystabell finally sloughs off the plastic wrapping implied by the record’s title, a memory only as she weaves and unweaves her spirit over the course of the ten exquisite tracks of Cellophane Memories.
