David Lynch: "Are You Sure?" (2013)

Drawn from the pockets of white noise that lurk around the fringes of Lynch’s fantasies, 2011’s Crazy Clown Time was so anxious to shock, alienate and confound that it was easy to forget that Lynch is an extraordinarily accomplished, melancholy songwriter in his own right. Released two years later, The Big Dream plays more as a showcase for that songcraft, going so far as to include a cover of Bob Dylan’s “The Ballad of Hollis Brown” among its many rambles and reveries. It’s fascinating to hear Lynch reimagine Dylan’s tableau as one of his own, just as it’s startling to hear the album reconstitute the blues-and-ballad structures that were grungily, even industrially, eviscerated on Crazy Clown Time. In fact, it often feels as if that exercise in weirdness was merely the precondition for returning to a stranger normality, a normality that climaxes on The Big Dream’s final track, “Are You Sure?” For the first time in his recent output, Lynch fully embraces the guitar pedals and lush feedback that haunted his music of the late 80s and early 90s – you can tell, immediately, that we’re back in the presence of the musician who composed Floating Into The Night and The Voice of Love with Angelo Badalamenti and Julee Cruise. By the same token, Lynch’s weird, hollowed out voice feels further from a gimmick than at any point on his last two albums – it almost ruins the song, only to make it all the more haunting, echoing Cruise in much the same way as she echoed herself on 2002’s The Art of Being a Girl, her own late reflection on Twin Peaks’ soundscapes. That Lynchian voice always works best when paired with naïve beauty, lyrics and sentiments that would seem simplistic in any other context – and  “Are You Sure?” is more haiku than song, moving between a few concrete images before settling on a note of indeterminate, inchoate longing that sets the whole album aquiver behind it. Like listening to the Twin Peaks theme after transcendental meditation, it’s familiar and unfamiliar, more itself than it ever was – and that’s the very essence of Lynch’s lyricism, perfect for the last track of an album.