I’m very excited to have my latest review up on Pitchfork. It’s of the beautiful new album, Cellophane Memories, by Texas-based singer Chrystabell and famed director David Lynch. This is somehow the second Lynch article I’ve had published this month, the first being an appreciation of his sound design for his great 1999 film The Straight Story; it appeared in The Wire. (Sadly, this week Lynch announced that, a lifelong smoker, he has developed emphysema — an even more serious diagnosis than the one the hero of The Straight Story receives early in that film.)
Here’s the opening section of my Cellophane Memories review:
The presence of director David Lynch’s name atop the new Chrystabell album, Cellophane Memories, will attract curious ears it might not have otherwise. After a few listens, however, you may wonder less about what Lynch brought to the table, and more about why Chrystabell, a Texas-based singer, is credited just once. Cellophane Memories should be attributed not to Chrystabell but to Chrystabells, plural. The greatest virtue of this beautiful album is how it layers her voice over and over—and over—again.
The opening of“With Small Animals” is a prime example of this collage effect—her vocal lines spin free from their ambiguous origin point like threads of an ever-fraying fabric. On “The Sky Falls,” the effect is more strategic, vaguely resembling a classical canon; the pacing of overlaps is ambiguous but still calculable. A synthesizer backdrop lends it an almost irritating texture, giving this seeming evanescence a uniquely off-kilter quality.
Cellophane Memories may be pretty, but it’s not easy. On “Reflections in a Blade,” the vocal bits are harshly clipped, providing a fractured view of an uncertain whole. They flicker by, the patterning delicious, forming a jumbled mess of voices.
The primary aspect of the new album that I focus on in the review is the use of layered vocals. Few singers today have Chrystabell’s smokey glass harmonica of a voice, and fewer still have freed themselves from the rote demands of rhyming as she has, a looseness that serves the album’s alternately diaphanous and fractured sensibility. The duo’s experimental approach to choral singing necessitates some opposing metaphor to the Ship of Theseus myth. In the Theseus story, every part of a ship is replaced over time, leaving one to wonder if it remains the same ship. With Cellophane Memories, the koan is: if a song’s vocal splinters into myriad composite parts, is there even still a song? Either way, a collection of such songs makes an album, and Cellophane Memories is a highly recommended one.
Read my full review at pitchfork.com.