Thomas Truax – Songs From The Films Of David Lynch

The second gig I ever went to see in Manchester was Thomas Truax at the Piccadilly Gardens Hotel, which is one of the most overtly Lynchian venues ever, being the backroom of a hotel with a decor more suited to a disappointing wedding reception than a gig, overseen by a blank-looking hotel employee at the bar. There was something else vaguely disquieting about the bar but I’ve forgotten what it is. Anyway, it definitely looks like it could be a David Lynch set.Thomas Truax’s music has been described, somewhere, in the past as “the perfect soundtrack to a David Lynch film,” (I probably paraphrase) but it isn’t really- with his lanky, bug-eyed stage persona and invented instruments, Truax just stepped out of a Tim Burton movie if anything. But it still seems like a really good idea, to me, for him to be covering songs from David Lynch. Or maybe it’s just the hotel. There are 10 songs here, and they’re all kind of minimalist, of a piece. Often tinted completely by being included in his work like Blue Velvet, sometimes not but you can still see how they fit into his universe. Some of Truax’s takes on them are really good. Covers of ‘Wicked Game’, ‘I Put A Spell On You’ and ‘In Dreams’ all clearly work, but then these are all fairly straightforward, solidly good songs anyway. The big, 10/10, absolute justification for the project is Truax’s take on ‘Falling’, the Twin Peaks theme (the version with vocals), which takes the lush, haunting, albeit obviously-just-superimposed-over-the-instrumental of the original, speeds it up about double and turns it into this brilliant, transcendent pop song. It’s everything you want the original to be and more. Plus I really, really like the Twin Peaks theme anyway. Amazing.‘Baby Please Don’t Go’ is a Nuggets classic but it really does get tiresome after a while, huh? At five minutes, it always feels like a chore, but Truax puts some very nice moves on it with a few springy pops from something probably invented and handclapping. Well done, I guess. Maybe it would have been nice to hear some of those weirder sounds elsewhere on the album. Well, ‘Audrey’s Dance’ has a fair few.Most of all, though, it would have been nice to see Truax do something interesting on any level with ‘Blue Velvet’. Not that I really blame him for being unable to, because the original is just so”¦ perfect and weird and wholesome and wrong all at the same time. And that’s not just because of the subliminal associations, I think. It’s a really weird song anyway, with those lazy, dreamy guitars and all that doowooping (predating Atlas Sound by about a century). But Truax’s cover is remarkably pedestrian, and he really doesn’t have the voice to make it anything like as strange as it should be.Basically, this record is Thomas Truax covering a bunch of songs from the films of someone who is probably one of your favourite directors (and if he isn’t, you’re wrong). There’s no real reason not to like it (except arguably that his ‘Blue Velvet’ isn’t very good), and his version of the Twin Peaks theme is frankly to die for. So yeah. 72%Thomas Truax on Myspace