David Lynch gives voice to unreliable simian singer Jack Cruz for this 7″ of noir-surreal DIY torch songs on Sacred Bones

When a new David Lynch work emerges into the world it is cause to gleefully plunge down the rabbit hole. This was certainly the case back in January, when Netflix unleashed Lynch’s What Did Jack Do? on an unsuspecting world. Seventeen minutes of upside-down, sui generis noir, the film has David Lynch as hardboiled detective – Jimmy Stewart from Mars doing his finest Humphrey Bogart, to adapt Mel Brooks’s description of this most singular of artists – interrogating a shifty looking, baggy-suited simian called Jack in the Elisha Cook Jr role. Watching was at first all par for the course for this dedicated Lynchian, until the monkey started to talk in David Lynch’s voice and with his mouth animated over Jack’s – as if Luis Buñuel had made an episode of Robot Chicken. Having re-adjusted and strapped in for the remainder of this peculiarly hilarious ride, there was yet another jolt of unreality to experience with Jack bursting into sudden, soul-consuming song.

“True Love’s Flame” is an oddly moving, heady slice of DIY American chanson. Think Blue Velvet with a touch of Animal Farm intended as an integral part of The Big Sleep’s labyrinthine plot. Hence this 7” release on Sacred Bones, where “True Love’s Flame” is twinned with a previously unheard Cruz number, “Dancin’ in the World of Love” – sort of Julee Cruise’s “The World Spins” re-cast as a crudely endearing David Lynch cartoon strip. Written by Lynch and frequent sonic collaborator Dean Hurley, these crooned, giddily swooning cuts are out of time gems that shrug off novelty through their pursuit of weirdness. Jack Cruz may be a creation of Lynch’s but he is compellingly brought to stuttering life-not-life across the short film and these songs. A fiction removed from a fiction, Cruz is the untrustworthy host of an end of world cabaret. Whereas Julee Cruise peeled away the strange on top to explore matters of the heart, Jack Cruz exposes the ludicrous, fragile surface nature of what it means to be in love.

The Flame of Love Bandcamp

Stewart Gardiner
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