Album No Twin Peaks, But Very Lynchian

Music has always been an integral part of David Lynch’s films: “Blue Velvet wouldn’t be Blue Velvet without Dennis Hopper’s lipstick-smeared face bearing down on Kyle MacLachlan to Roy Orbison’s ‘In Dreams,’” writes Mike Powell for Pitchfork. So it makes sense that Fox Bat Strategy, recorded in 1994—Lynch supplied the lyrics and told the musicians to improvise—and finally released as a tribute to late lead vocalist Dave Jaurequi, explores the same “musical mood Lynch has explored for decades.”

The “low-lit, hot-breathed, soft-focus rock” turns Powell “thoroughly inside out.” Yet the album, featuring the musicians who worked with Lynch on Twin Peaks: Fire Walk With Me, “doesn’t carry the heft of the feeling that Twin Peaks did.” Still, when it works, the best moments in his music—like his movies—“drag his audience into oceans of loose association and feelings that can't quite be boiled down or sorted out.” (More David Lynch stories.)