David Lynch delivers a sprawling electronic first album laced with an edgy junkyard backdrop and nightmare undertones. Reminiscent of the soundtrack to one of his films, Crazy Clown Town is a cluttered trudge through a drunken dreamscape. With the sound of clanking tin cans and nightmare echoes haunting the background of a fantastic array of diverse and unnerving dance and electro numbers.
The album opens with Pinky’s Dream a muffled banger laced with the screams of Karen O pleading “please Pinky watch the road”. It sets the mood for what lies ahead and is a fitting precursor to Good Day Today, a cracking dance dub number that plods along at a catchy pace with weird stabbing synths distorting the rhythm. The album then slows for a while drifting through the next four tracks like a sleepwalking heroin addict. So Glad and Noah’s Ark are whining, rickety plods but maintain the established smoking ambience, until the startling Strange and Unproductive Thinking kicks in: a searing, outstanding, spoken word space trip with a mystical, scratchy vinyl vibe. It is here that Lynch’s voice rises through the swamp of distortions becoming recognisable amidst the carnage: he sings on all the album tracks (bar the first and one instrumental) but his voice is distorted.
The Night Bell With Lightning is an instrumental sigh reminiscent of Angelo Badalamenti’s Twin Peaks score. It bleeds slow then seeps succulently into Stone’s Gone Up; a spoken word, gravel voiced puppy dog chant and one of the few stand-out tracks. Until Crazy Clown Time and the wonderful These Are My Friends lead the album gracefully into its final act consisting of Movin’ On and She Rise Up. The latter sounding like a robot dying in the desert, the former more of what we’ve heard before.
Then all of a sudden it’s over and the first thing you want to do is play it again, if only to confirm that it wasn’t just a dream. Crazy Clown Time is notable mostly for its innovative execution, evoking feelings of alienation and dread by vocal distortions and jumbled static clouds. Like a car boot sale in space it references the weirdest of Pink Floyd, the darkest of Portishead, a smidgen of Beck and lashings of Nick Cave. It’s an absorbing insight into Lynch’s mangled mindscape and proof of how his imagination can manifest gracefully through music. At present Crazy Clown Time appears somewhat lost amongst genres as it incorporates elements of many but is nothing of the sort. One thing that’s for certain is it will never be forgotten, it’s just too damn weird for that.
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