STACK June 2017 Issue 152

78 / 93

16 JUNE 2017
visit MUSIC FEATURE
"T wanggg … doo-dunggg ...
tee-wanggg … doo dunggg."
You know the feeling, right? It's
lovely but anxious, orchestral but
fake, lush as a woolly jumper but
weirdly chilling at the same. It's
the theme to Twin Peaks, and with
or without Julee Cruise's ethereal
vocal, it's every bit as evocative of
the early 1990s as Nirvana and the
Gulf War.
David Lynch's surreal soap opera
is back, of course, as promised
by dead heroine Laura Palmer in
a final episode dream sequence
25 years ago. The music on these
two albums has gone underground
in that time, but like the themes
to Jaws and The Twilight Zone,
it's continued to lurk as shorthand
for anything that is unsettling
or inexplicable in the everyday
melodrama of life.
There's much more to love about
Angelo Badalamenti's Grammy-
winning soundtrack album, which hit
the Australian Top 10 all those years
ago. The composer's recurring trick
is best illustrated by Laura Palmer's
Theme , which manages to flip from
suffocating synthesised dread to the
orgasmic ecstasy of Clayderman-
esque piano rapture and back again.
Then there's the finger-clicking
jazz-schmaltz thread of Audrey's
Dance and Freshly Squeezed:
all vibraphone shimmer and
horns mewling like lusty cats. To
Twin Peaks tragics, it's nagging
nightmares of red velvet curtains
and that strange little man talking
backwards. To the rest of us, it's like
looking through a kaleidoscope after
too many martinis.
The warpo West Side Story vibe
spills over to side two, but the
finger-clicks are out of sync now
pretend there's nothing to see in
the fog.
It all adds up to that rarest of
things in these days of music-as-
product-placement: a bespoke
soundscape that's indivisible from
the series it scores. The original
vocal version of the theme, the
ARIA chart-topping Falling, is one of
three tracks flown in from Cruise's
album Floating Into the Night, with
Lynch's own indecipherable lyrics
swimming in a black sea of reverb.
The big-screen companion to
the TV series, the fractured 1992
prequel Fire Walk With Me, copped
some brickbats on its original
release but the score is a suitably
cinematic advance on the telly
series.
The Theme as such is less iconic
and more amorphous, chimneys of
synth fogging up the landscape as
Jim Haynes' muted trumpet lays
down some classic noir.
Cold synths, cool brass, vibes
and creeping bass lines keep the
mood palette in the same vaguely
dangerous ballpark but the movie
soundtrack is a more straight-
up and classically sophisticated
development after the unnerving
juxtapositions of Badalamanti's TV
score.
The Pine Float is Mancini-esque
cool jazz and Sycamore Trees, with
its astonishing vocal by jazz singer
"Little" Jimmy Scott, twists some
familiar Twin Peaks cadences into a
tragic torch song Billie Holiday might
have sung at the Downbeat Club in
the '40s.
The composer sings a couple
himself – or at least speaks and
shouts and mutters Lynch's lyrics
like Travis Bickle on a Bukowski jag –
and Cruise returns in her trademark
floating bubble of anti-Disney matter
for Questions In AWorld of Blue.
There's heightened menace in The
Pink Room and the sweetest cut of
all in the languid piano-guitar duet,
Best Friends. And then there's a
Montage, in the penultimate grooves,
resetting some of the '50s diner
twang and kitschy concert piano
motifs from the original TV series.
It culminates in that crushingly
familiar tinkle of Laura Palmer's
Theme, brilliantly wedded by some
spooky atmospheric osmosis to the
notes we've waited too long to hear.
"Twanggg … doo-dunggg ... tee-
wanggg … doo dunggg…" Don’t think
you've heard the last of them yet.
with an agitated drummer trying
his best to scramble the downward
spiral of The Bookhouse Boys.
The jazz and atmos melt together
in Night Life In Twin Peaks, the
synths rising up like phantoms while
an agitated flute does its best to
Twin Peaks fever is burning high this month, so Michael Dwyer has unsleeved the
soundtracks for David Lynch's seminal television series and the follow-up feature film.
Composed by Angelo Badalamenti (who also scored Lynch's Blue Velvet, Wild At Heart,
Lost Highway , The Straight Story and Mulholland Drive ), the hauntingly beautiful scores
for Music FromTwin Peaks and Twin Peaks: FireWalkWith Me are best experienced
on vinyl, and they're available right now via Warner. Words Michael Dwyer
It all adds up to that
rarest of things in
these days of music-
as-product-placement:
a bespoke soundscape
that's indivisible from
the series it scores