Album review: Thomas Truax

Published on Sunday 29 March 2009 23:30

THOMAS TRUAX: SONGS FROM THE FILMS OF DAVID LYNCH **** SL/PsychoTeddy

LIKE David Lynch, Thomas Truax is a slightly eccentric, obsessive artist with a taste for haunting vintage rock'n'roll. His music – played on homemade instruments and containing strange, out-there lyrics about trapped butterflies – would sound perfect in a Lynch movie.

The two have met – Lynch thinks Truax has "cool shoes" – so perhaps one day this will happen. In the meantime, Truax is paying homage to a kindred spirit with this album. It's the best kind of tribute – affectionate and respectful, but with its own quirks and imaginative leaps and its own distinct identity.

Sometimes Truax plays it straight – his versions of Blue Velvet and Wicked Game are mostly faithful, just with a more rough-edged production – but Falling, the stately Julee Cruise theme from Twin Peaks, bobs along jauntily, even throwing in a harmonica solo. And David Bowie's I'm Deranged (from Lost Highway), is almost unrecognisable in a stripped down acoustic version.

It all amounts to what Hollywood might call a "reimagining" – like Steven Soderbergh's Solaris rather than Tim Burton's Planet of the Apes – and is a reminder of how essential music is to Lynch's films that'll make you want to revisit both the movies and the original songs.