Wednesday 5 October 2011

Chrysta Bell - This Train

Mood Music

This album has had a 13 year gestation – and that seems a dangerous term to use in the context of David Lynch as producer: as if he has slowly nurtured a monstrous musical creation to now unleash upon us. Whilst it has Lynch’s trademark swaths of moody ambient chords and noise, it is, with singer Chrystal Bell, a lush and immediately accessible sound. Bell has a fulsome voice, augmented by echo on tracks like Swing With Me which is a slow brooding blues, and opener This Train is choo-chooed in strongly to set the scene for the album’s panoramic vocal and instrumental layering.  All the songs are written by Lynch and sung by long-time collaborator Bell who first met up with the Hollywood maverick in 1998, aged 20.  For me, it is more mood music than an exploration of songcraft, and that brooding methodical beat of most to make its whole will require a similar listening inclination, whatever you hear in the moods being hammered home in the repetitions and layerings.

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