Release Date: Aug 2, 2024
Genre(s): Pop/Rock
Record label: Sacred Bones
Music Critic Score
How the Music Critic Score works
Buy Cellophane Memories from Amazon
When you enter the world of David Lynch you're never quite sure what the rules are. Navigating his haunting dreamscapes and shifting realities often necessitates a total surrender of any preconceived logic. On his spellbinding new record with Texas-born singer Chrystabell, Cellophane Memories, the cinematic visionary again conjures a shadowy, immersive terrain of endless mystery.
This first collaborative full-length between Chrystabell and David Lynch was, according to its accompanying press release, born out of a nighttime walk that the latter took "through a forest of tall trees, over the tops of which he saw a bright light." So far, so Lynch. Music has always been at the beating heart of all his best-known work as a filmmaker and Cellophane Memories might be his finest work as a musician in his own right. It's certainly the most outright Lynchian, imbued with a ghostly, uneasy atmosphere.
Photo by David Lynch Vocalist Chrystabell first worked as an actress with poly-artist David Lynch on the third season of the 2010s incarnation of Twin Peaks, in which she played the FBI agent Tammy Preston. That wasn't the beginning of their collaboration: The two had worked together on her debut album This Train (2011) and the EP Somewhere in the Nowhere (2016). His famous vocal muse, the high soprano Julee Cruise, had quite a different voice from Chrystabell, whose sultry alto combines a warm lower register with the capacity to venture upward in head voice.
There's a scene in Twin Peaks: The Return, David Lynch and Mark Frost's 25 years later reprise of the surreal mystery series, that's haunted me since its transmission in 2017. Kyle MacLachlan's Special Agent Dale Cooper, finally freed from the extra-dimensional Black Lodge and returned to present-day America, now finds himself trapped in the life of sleazy insurance salesman Dougie Jones. Virtually comatose, Dougie/Cooper stumbles through each day with little understanding of the world around him.
is available now