David Lynch – Crazy Clown Time

Created with the help of engineer Dean Hurley (Inland Empire), Crazy Clown Time is a Lynchian vision of experimental 'modern blues' that only partially manages to follow through on the promise of his remarkable 2007 single, Ghost of Love. To his credit Lynch shows a knack for spinning unsettling narratives and embroidering them with compellingly straightforward poetry but the prevalence of reverb-soaked tremolo guitar (together with Lynch's prodigiously untrained monotone) endows the album with an unfortunate sense of homogeneity, notwithstanding a convincing cameo performance from Karen O.

An interminable vocoder monologue about the evolution of consciousness sucks the wind out of the album's middle stretch before the outstanding closing one/two hit of Movin' Up/She Rise Up confirms that Lynch has put real heart into this project; the latter track uncannily transforming a simple tale of devotion and loss into a bruisingly powerful hymn to loneliness by means of some seriously astute production choices.