Cellophane Memories, David Lynch’s latest musical collaboration with Texas-born singer Chrystabell, drifts by in a haze. Even if you’re not too familiar with Lynch’s work or the entire aesthetic the filmmaker’s surname has been associated with (and often misused), the album title hints at the thinly nostalgic nature of its music, which is preoccupied with dreams, memory, and suggestive scene-setting more than any kind of solvable mystery. Chrystabell – who has frequently collaborated with Lynch since contributing to the Inland Empire soundtrack and played FBI agent Tammy Preston in Twin Peaks: The Return – has likened it to “mood music,” but clarified, “not that it creates mood, but more that it reflects your own.” You come out of it unsure what’s happened but mesmerized nonetheless, and if it serves its purpose, with a keener awareness of your environment and headspace.
Lynch and Chrystabell’s first album together, 2011’s This Train, was a rather conventional yet transfixing offering in a subgenre that Lynch – with his and frequent collaborator Angelo Badalamenti’s production in Julee Cruise’s 1989 album Floating Into the Night – helped establish. By contrast, the dreampop of Cellophane Memories is sparser, largely beatless, and more experimental – more dream, less pop, essentially – as if expansed by the passage of time. Still, the intimate dance between Lynch’s airy synths and Chrystabell’s angelic vocals remains intriguing; the production has a way of beautifully diffusing the bluesy, confessional element of Chrystabell’s prior work without overshadowing its power. Floating atop the overlapping, stitched-up, and reversed layers of her voice, fragments become the focus, boundaries are blurred, and the mundane bleeds into the otherworldly. If only there was a word for that.
At times, the arrangements are a little too amorphous to keep you hooked in the swirl of it all. But they are tender, vulnerable, and, if nothing else, cinematically paced. In ‘The Sky Falls’, Lynch’s synths soften the frail resignation of Chrystabell’s words, barely decipherable except when they mention death, into something ethereal rather than downcast. When he switches to a twangy, reverb-drenched guitar, it has a strangely grounding effect, shedding light on the expository details of ‘You Know the Rest’ and rendering the sensuality of ‘Two Lovers Kiss’ all the more palpable. But the record is at its most sweeping when it includes contributions from the late Badalamenti, whose epic synths heighten the wondrous (and decidedly unerotic) romanticism of ‘So Much Love’, as well as composer Dean Hurley, whose bass and drums turn ‘The Answers to the Questions’ into not only an ominously lurching standout but the undeniable centerpiece.
Cellophane Memories supposedly came to Lynch in a vision during a nighttime walk in a forest, where a bright light became visible over the tops of tall trees. That vision manifests in the brooding highlight ‘Reflections in a Blade’, driving the climax of the action, which you can just about decipher if you look hard enough: “Darkness would not hide her for long/ She took a breath and ran/ She ran as fast as she could to the back of the house/ The light of the flashlight dancing like a shiny knife blade.” It should be no spoiler that it turns out to be a dream, though one vivid and violent enough to leave you questioning the reality around it. “She thought they had a bond/ An unshakable bond/ But was it too good to be true?” Chrystabell wonders, in a wave of profound lucidity, on ‘The Answers to the Questions’. But once she wakes from that dream, she is floored by a connection that transcends two human beings; the final track is called ‘Sublime Eternal Love’. Whether you could call the conclusion Lynchian is up for debate. But it’s the gentle beauty, not the ambiguity or weirdness, that animates this collaborative album, echoing through the silence left in its wake.