David Lynch – ‘The Big Dream’
Being weird for the sake of being weird is the death of art. However, in the strange case of David Lynch, weirdness is a deadly serious and sincere pursuit. The liminal, distant pulse of the titular album opener, ‘The Big Dream’, instantly sounds like his movies. It also shares the same characteristic of almost manically searching for something unknowable in the far reaches of the norms, probing desperately at the brink of standard forms for a truth that lingers beyond.
The Big Dream also shares the same Lynchian trope that this expedition for hidden meaning might never actually breach new ground; you might never actually learn anything, and Lynch himself might not find whatever he was looking for. But that doesn’t mean that the album leaves you frustrated—you don’t rue the wailing sparsity of the record, which sounds like the blues being hurled into a void; you feel entranced by its march towards madness.
Typically, the blues is a blunt and visceral form of music—the emotions, sentiments, and sounds are knowable and clear. Rarely would you associate the same 12-bar squeal of Howlin’ Wolf with the wishy-washy nature of ambient music, but Lynch somehow tries to pair the two, like a sculpture of a dandelion’s pappus made of bricks and mortar. The result is an avant-garde oddity of an impossible marriage, vaguely headachy at turns but beautifully peculiar at others.
The driving riffs make the record familiar; they give it a muscularity and structure. Meanwhile, his distinctive vocals give it an endearing character. The odd production choices muddy the whole thing, with lyrics barely identifiable. The wavering melodies make it mildly frustrating. But the singular world in which all this exists in unholy union is never anything less than interesting.
So, you’re strung along by it, and then you suddenly happen upon moments of sweetness like ‘Cold Wind Blowin’’ where the whole thing magically starts making sense. It is a genuinely emotive moment, marginally laughable thanks to his twang, that makes for the oddest companion piece to ‘Winds of Change’ by Scorpions in existence. There’s a lot of ‘sitting on a bench contemplating life’ energy abounding, and then, without warning, he transitions to a Bob Dylan cover.
Pervading this patchwork is the same woozy yet driving atmosphere like Link Wray on Valium piped through the speakers in a sauna. This is intoxicating by proxy, so much so that you barely realise just how flimsy the substance of the songs are until the odd sobering second when a cold wind whisks you back to reality. But now that the release has gathered dust, it is clear that those winds haven’t blown it away. It has not been bellied by its worst patches and rendered a vanity project but rather sustained its singular surrealness.
That’s because, for all the album might not be great in a traditional musical sense, and it seems detectable at times that Lynch isn’t truly even a musician, there is a deep well of feeling in the mix. This atmosphere is comforting in that it grabs the hand of the reality around you and quickly whisks it down a different path—so, when you want to escape the veracity of your existence for a while, there are far worse records to turn to than the metallic otherworldly nonsense of The Big Dream.
