Chrystabell & David Lynch
Cellophane Memories
SACRED BONES
David Lynch didn’t need the recent news of work-altering emphysema in order for fans to worry about their hero. The aging process (he’s 78) and the movie business (Netflix thwarted his recent plans for a new film) put everything that America’s most eccentric fine artist makes at a premium. Capitalizing on the self-made sound design elements he’s crafted for films such as Eraserhead and Lost Highway, his co-composition work with Angelo Badalamenti, and his experiments in ambient-ethereal pop for vocalist/collaborator Julee Cruise, Lynch has long maintained his hunger for musical communion—especially when it comes to working with vocalists like Lykke Li and Karen O.
Texas-born, Nico-esque chanteuse Chrystabell has long fit that bill for Lynch, a breathy synth-pop poetess whose words and music have been featured in the director’s Inland Empire (not to mention her acting role alongside the filmmaker in Twin Peaks: The Return), as well as through collaborative recordings such as 2011’s This Train and 2016’s Somewhere in the Nowhere EP. If Billie Eilish and FINNEAS were stuck on a frozen tundra, living exclusively in the dark, that would clearly define the Chrystabell/Lynch experience.
From its lush Badalementi co-writes “She Knew” and “So Much Love” through to the album’s clusterfuck closing number, “Sublime Eternal Love,” Cellophane Memories is an often torrid test of all of their previously rendered strengths, where the singer’s multi-layered, multi-tracked vocal collages become a sliver of sound (and a surprisingly soulful R&B tone, at that) within Lynch’s off-putting yet unusually beautiful music. How many Chrystabells does it take to screw in a lightbulb? Listen to “With Small Animals,” with her voice tied to Lynch’s huff-and-puffing test pattern tones, and you tell me.
In all actuality, it’s not so easy to hear where one artist ends and the other begins. To that end, Cellophane Memories is a perfectly seamless and sensual work—not exactly cellophane, but certainly oblique and tactile. While “The Sky Falls” comes across as a heavenly sung chamber-classical suite made grotesque by a synthesizer line tossed into a blender, “Reflections in a Blade” takes that same sauntering vocal and buggy synth and wood-chips the lot of it into head-spinning, heavy-breathing fragments. On “The Answers to the Questions,” Lynch’s musical workmate and co-composer Dean Hurley lends the proceedings a greater sense of dread with his shuddering bass and drum pulse.
Whether listened to as chilling individual snapshots or one long flipbook of frantic images, Cellophane Memories is a grand spectral work of art that fits in nicely with both of its creators’ individual oeuvres.
