...Putovanje Nakraj Noci...Avant-noir filmmaker David Lynch calls his debut solo album "modern blues," but postmodern is more like it: Warm synths and woozy electric guitars transmit warped waves of sound over beats that stalk, stagger, throb, and creep. Lynch's wobbly croak of a voice is frequently manipulated to sound robotic or distant, or as if his mouth is stuffed with dinner rolls. Karen O coos and yelps through propulsive opener "Pinky's Dream," but Lynch handles most everything else here -- vocals, guitar, writing, production -- creating soundscapes that are dark, unsettling, and often confusing. Which is to say, quite a bit like his films.
“Pinky’s Dream” kicks things off with a hushed lead vocal by Yeah Yeah Yeahs frontman Karen O, whose whispers of “Please Pinky, watch the road…” give the song a haunting late-night driving vibe not dissimilar from Lynch’s own Lost Highway. “Good Day” switches things up entirely—a lush surge of house synths and deceptively cheery lead vocals, processed beyond recognition of course. On “So Glad”, Lynch relishes the departure of his “ball and chain” over a slow, gloomy march of guitar licks and crunching beats. “I know a song to sing on this dark, dark, dark night,” he whispers menacingly on “Noah’s Ark”, a fantastically creepy electro dirge that segues nicely into the brutally heavy guitars of “Football Game”, a disarmingly coy tale of infidelity at… you’ll never guess where.
Do yourself a huge favor by skipping “Strange And Unproductive Thinking”, a seven-plus minute tirade of just that—Lynch’s newfound love of pseudo-spiritual nonsense sounds infinitely more asinine coming from a robot’s voice. You’re better off with “Stone’s Gone Up”, an uptempo, propulsive guitar groove with some gorgeously evocative keyboard textures over the outro. The effectively disturbing title track and downtempo “These Are My Friends” (best lyric on the entire album: “I’ve got a prescription for our problems—Keep the hounds at bay!”) kick off the album’s drag of a final act, but things pick up at the very end with “She Rise Up” and its hissing industrial grind and Moby-esque synth-symphonica.
