Beautiful and strange, the score to
David Lynch's
Blue Velvet is a staggering surrealist's nightmare told with the heart of a saint. Dense orchestrations float along whispers of dark, unnerving melodies; an astounding sense of menace coils inside even the most reassuring of moments. This marked the first collaboration between
Lynch and
Angelo Badalamenti, and its fusion of the sublime and the dangerous is breathtaking. There are
Bernard Herrmann violin slashes, revisited classics (
Roy Orbison's "In Dreams,"
Bobby Vinton's title track), and the peak of the whole experience, "Mysteries of Love."
This Mortal Coil turned down requests to use their beloved version of "Song to the Siren," but
Badalamenti manages to construct a piece of such simplicity, of such beauty, that you wonder why a composer didn't create it before in the first place. Brutally compelling, like one of Jeffrey Beaumont's own mysteries, this is an extraordinary experience filled with both fear and love. [In 2017,
Angelo Badalamenti's
Blue Velvet score was reissued by the Fire label as a limited-edition LP pressed on split black/blue-colored vinyl.] ~ Dean Carlson