The Big Dream is just like its author: predictable and new at the same time, familiar and eerie, menacing and peaceful. It’s a contradiction.
David Lynch may not have singing as his strongest suit and many, upon seeing the bizarre video TBD716 that foreran the album, actually hoped a new movie was in the making possibly Ronnie Rocket? was whispered with fingers crossed.
Only four days after the 43 seconds teaser was uploaded to Youtube the album was released to positive critical acclaim.
If Lynch’s visuals tend to capture what perturbed nightmares feel like his music is fit to score them.
The lyrics seem ironic at times, but what is truly surprising is time itself which thins down and disappears as you listen to this record: it has propulsory force and stillness mixed into one, like driving at night or deserted non-places.
It’s an album number two and had to show something for it, some sort of newly discovered maturity and it surely delivers tighter songs than the debut Crazy Clown Time, less art stunt and more executed inspiration.
But polished clarity is not what dream logic deals with: it presents a scenario, a stage, a setting, an array of feelings. You’re supposed to do the interpreting bit by letting the vision, the dream logic, engulf you.
Once again Lynch teams up with producer and arranger Dean Hurley and the result, albeit endowed with reverb guitars and creepy echoes to please the fans, is secured into a perceivable coherence.
It’s eleven modern blues and one cover, The ballad of Hollis Brown (less Bob Dylan and more Nina Simone), the first single I’m waiting here sees the only guest vocalist of the album Lykke Li (one of the best moments in the soundtrack to The twilight saga: New moon with Possibility) glimmer with melodic purity.
Do not expect vintage vinyl charm, though. David Lynch has had to cave in to the way music is experienced today. Being not flexible by his own admission it was a heartache to mix and master the tracks “in a way that they sound like at least something on a computer”.
Through driving at night, or wandering around in non-places, with the friction between inaction and movement, sometimes epiphanic clarity sparks.
When it happens Lynch’s music is capable of moulding, following whichever feeling is carrying you without disappearing completely.
It’s what remains after a dream, when you put aside the elements you can trace back to your own subconscious. The things you can’t explain, have no idea where they came from, the ones that suggest actual magic. That’s what this album is truly about.
[Rating:4.5]
