Sometimes it’s hard not to think that David Lynch’s fixation on transcendental meditation isn’t a joke the filmmaker is playing on us. Is there any major artist whose entire body of work has seemed more ominous, more filled with sinister intonations, less meditative? Mantras don’t come much scarier than “fire walk with me.”
Lynch’s first solo album, “Crazy Clown Time,” doesn’t sound very Maharishi-approved, either. If you’ve ommm-ed your way to a state of higher consciousness, it’s just the record to bring yourself back down to earth, though it might overcompensate by taking you to the third or fourth rung of the underworld. Maybe, with all these tense and nerve-racking sounds, Lynch just intends to create more demand for the calming cure that TM is meant to offer.
That said, the album is frequently funny, on top of creepy -- not in a just-kidding-about-all-this kind of way, but in that peculiarly Lynchian manner in which a strong streak of absurdism has always offset the unsettling.
The album’s only guest vocal is right up front, with Karen O of the Yeah Yeah Yeahs taking the lead on a breathy “Pinky’s Dream,” in which she repeatedly implores, “Please, Pinky, watch the road.” The song’s abrupt ending suggests that he didn’t. (Maybe it was their wrecked car that Nic Cage and Laura Dern came upon in “Wild at Heart”?)
In that opener, as in most of the tracks, Lynch is doing variations on the dark and elementary blues shuffles he and Angelo Badalamenti used to come up with for roadhouse and party scenes in the "Twin Peaks" franchise. You get a lot of tremolo guitar, doled out as sparingly as possible, as if Lynch took four bars of an old Ventures song and decided to parcel all those deep, twangy chords out one by one over the course of an entire album.
But this is the first time we’ve heard much of Lynch singing… or “singing.” He does more acting on this album than he ever did on-screen, so we don’t really hear much of his natural Jimmy-Stewart-on-Mars voice, since even when he’s doing spoken-word pieces, he makes some attempt to filter or disguise his vocals.
The title track finds Lynch talking in a high-pitched boy’s voice as he describes a backyard bacchanalia. “Pauley had a red shirt… Suzy had hers off completely… Buddy screamed so loud, he spit,” Lynch nearly whines, against a lurching backdrop of threatening blues, disturbing guitar interruptions, and constant moans. He could almost be a maniac describing a massacre, but more likely, he’s an actual kid, cheerfully trying to come to terms with the mysterious goings-on he witnessed at a teenagers’ beer bash.
He’s definitely playing an adult, and a disturbed one, in “Football Game” (“I saw you with another man/You better run, baby, I hope you can”), “These Are My Friends” (“I got a prescription for a problem, keeps the hounds at bay”), and “Speed Roadster” (“I know you f---ed Al/He’s supposed to be my pal… I might be stalkin’ you”).
