If you don’t know David Lynch’s work, good luck. Cellophane Memories, his first full-length album with Chrystabell in 13 years, is another entry in the legendary film director’s large index of the weird. His debut album with Chrystabell, 2011’s supremely underrated This Train, had compulsively listenable songs with rhythms and beats (the title track, “Swing with Me”) as well as his expected foray into the avant-garde (“Bird of Flames”). But Cellophane Memories floats aimlessly with little-to-no context and almost no beats to speak of.
It’s hard to imagine this music as anything else but another augment of his cinematic work, although Cellophane Memories appears to exist on its own. It’s fitting that the two singles each have music videos, both directed by Lynch; most of these songs can barely stand on their own two feet as they are. Bless Chrystabell’s heart. She is a gifted singer (see This Train and her solo work), but here Lynch has relegated her talents to sighing close to the mic in a husky soprano with hushed melodies that do little to flatter her untouched voice, less Billie Eilish at her most jazzy and more a ghoul moaning atonally.
It’s a shame Cellophane Memories is such a bummer. This Train, while stylistically similar, has both Lynch and Chrystabell at the top of their game—songs you could picture humming along to while walking down dark alleys; songs you could burn the midnight oil with; songs you could seduce with. There was a life energy—an off-kilter life energy, but still very much a palpable feeling of love for music, mystery and sex. The songs on Cellophane Memories, however, as hinted by its nostalgic title, are sterile and anodyne, with little of the bluesy supernatural noir characteristic of Lynch’s best work. But there is one exception, “The Answers to the Questions,” the only song on the entire album with a beat. The rest of the record just sounds dead and airy, a collection of vaguely ambient, beatless dream pop songs that come and go like wisps of forgotten memories lost in a dark forest.
“The Answers to the Questions” is the only real highlight here. Reminiscent of “Swing with Me” from This Train, the song sways with a bluesy grit that is largely absent elsewhere—with much needed bass and drums courtesy of longtime Lynch collaborator Dean Hurley. And the results are magical, familiar and comforting, in an otherwise colorless album full of wide, blank synthscapes and multi-tracked vocals that lead to nowhere, tripping over each other by some unknown force. Hurley’s drums are the only ones on the album. Despite “The Answers to the Questions” being the longest song, those drums disappear all too quickly, leaving you wanting (much) more. “You Know the Rest” and “Two Lovers Kiss” are also (sort of) standouts, but only because of Lynch’s twangy guitar, which adds character to otherwise flavorless songs. The two tracks, like most of the album, just go nowhere with their muted palette.
“Reflections in a Blade” is reminiscent of “Bird of Flame” from This Train. Both songs share menacing voices and ominous titles. And, while “Reflections in a Blade” doesn’t feature Lynch’s own voice (his voice is nowhere to be found on this album, for that matter), it does include what sounds like a demon heavily breathing backwards, next to Chrystabell’s own reversed sighs, in addition to deep bass synths. Whereas “Bird of Flame” had Lynch sing the part of the demon, the presence of evil on “Reflections in a Blade” remains unacknowledged. The danger just indifferently hangs there, like most of this forgettable tracklist.
Posthumously, Angelo Badalementi, the composer behind Twin Peaks and many of Lynch’s other works, contributes synths to “She Knew” and “So Much Love.” His synth work, unfortunately, is really not that much different from Lynch’s own synths elsewhere. I only knew Badalamenti contributed synths at all once I read the credits. As research for this review, desperate to make some sense of Cellophane Memories, I watched Inland Empire and Twin Peaks: The Return—the two cinematic collaborations between Chrystabell and David Lynch. (Their song “Polish Poem” appears in Inland Empire; Chrystabell plays the strangely polarizing FBI agent Tammy Preston in The Return.) Wrestling with those two gargantuan works of cinema (3 hours and 18 hours, respectively) proved just as difficult if not more so than wrangling this enigmatic and frustrating album. But then again, no one goes to David Lynch for answers. You were never going to get them anyways.
Peyton Toups is a writer based in Brooklyn. His work has appeared at Pitchfork and SPIN.
