This week, well last week, the tireless Mondo Records released what could be one of the the most iconic and essential scores of the past 30 years: the Twin Peaks soundtrack.
Lovingly packaged in a deluxe-but-not-deluxury lasercut packaging with "damn fine coffee" coloured wax, Angelo Badalamenti's magnum opus has never looked and sounded better.
The album treads a cool-cat fine line between smokehouse jazz and teledrama lavishness. Pure eye-line lit, cigarette smoke hustle. The last dying embers before the night hits. Pure noir mixed with the musical equivalent of crash zooms as someone on Days of Our Lives finds a dead body while out on a jog. Julee Cruise's haunting ghost-pale vocals on "The Nightingale" and "Into The Night" echoing the stories main theme of Who Killed Laura Palmer? The voice haunting the stage of wooden paneled hotels and truckstop reflections, lingering over each actor like a sheet.
Double bass, fingerclicks, and vibraphone at first sounding cool, confident, but slowly peeling back like wet wallpaper revealing darkness and mystery. Coming slowly down the hall, touching the walls as it goes, scraping bits off as it comes.
Badalamenti's score is nothing short of a masterpiece and even isolated from the film, makes for one of the greatest things you'll ever put on your turntable. Inimitable mood music, turning your flat into a whisky soaked cube of smoke reek and desire.
So while I'm here, I thought id recommend a follow up album to listen to. A basic follow up to the Twin Peaks soundtrack. A shade darker, but no less incredible.
Bohren & Der Club of Gore started out in a bunch of metal and hardcore bands in Germany, soon deciding to focus on other things, they naturally started playing Jazz. Jazz mixed with their past band mentalities and natures, coalescing into their own slow, slick version of Doom Jazz. Patient and deadly, moody and focused.
"Sunset Mission" is B&DCOG's greatest album (and one of my favourite albums of all time). Sounding distinctly similar to the Twin Peaks soundtrack but its own oilier versions. Where Twin Peaks goes for noir-drama, Sunset goes for pure oil black sludge. Replacing diners and hotels for abandoned industrial estates and alleyways in the rain. Chimneys in the night blasting out steam, lit by the streetlights in the industrial estates. Languidly lurching towards you like its been shot in the leg, the album knows when instruments are needed, not cramming it with pace and hooks. Everything builds and pulses. Vibraphone trickles in and fucks off, strings move and recede, the drums gloomily played like they're being hit by a guy who's joints have frozen, horns rasp in from another room then float into another. Everything is cool, slow and creepy.
Its a pure transformative album, listening to it in the car or on a run completely changes the landscape. Things go from benign to suspicious. Time slows. Everything crystallizes, and its fucking amazing.
I'll stop now, but aye give Twin Peaks a buy and a listen, but if you want to meet its goth wee brother, listen to Bohren & Der Club of Gore's "Sunset Mission". Its an oil black slick of gloom and you'll love it.
-findlay
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