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Jul 15, 2013Even if his take on the blues is far from straightforward, this might be the most accessible set of songs associated with Lynch to date. In its own hypnotic way, The Big Dream honors the blues' lust for life and its lonely heart.
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Jul 16, 2013It’s a vastly superior record, drawing you in with its electronic, murky ambience and the impression that these songs are coming to you from a singer submerged in water.
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Jul 16, 2013More tightly structured and confident than 2011’s ‘Crazy Clown Time in terms of narrative, there’s further clarity in the unmistakable voice, which though heavily filtered feels much closer to his own.
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Jul 15, 2013It’s uncertain music from an uncertain man, an artifact that will continue to influence growing pains from the many Lynchian dreamers.
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Jul 12, 2013An intriguing album befitting of a fascinating man.
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Jul 12, 2013It continues one of the most singular artistic visions of modern times and while it may not push it any further it’s often so damn charming as to make you forget about all that and just drift away into Lynch’s meditative world, in wrong love with the weird.
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Jul 23, 2013With a few more such thoughtfully crafted moments The Big Dream might have been an entirely adequate sidenote in Lynch’s ever-growing oeuvre. As it stands, it is barely that.
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Jul 26, 2013The Big Dream, like so much of his output, seems gloriously unbothered by chronology or even sense of place.
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Jul 12, 2013A thoroughly decent album from start to finish.
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Jul 16, 2013There’s enough musical ambition, heartbreak and menace on The Big Dream to keep the Lynch nerds absorbed.
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Aug 16, 2013It’s more of an unconscious escape hatch that Lynch has constructed with intangible aural elements--a fantasy place that he allows us to walk around in for a while until we are forced back into the realm of the painfully awake.
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Jul 25, 2013It’s an album of spare and precise beauty, and when it was over I really wanted to see the film.
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Jul 16, 2013Submitting yourself to its hazy beauty may prove challenging for some, but for those willing to explore these unsteady climes, the journey will provide countless delights for the senses.
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Jul 15, 2013The main weakness is the same one found on Crazy Clown Time: the songs. As songs, they don’t do much or say much.
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Jul 24, 2013At the very least, the album should convince diehard Lynch fans that the director’s self-imposed, semi-retirement from filmmaking is bearing some very interesting artistic fruit indeed.
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Q MagazineAug 20, 2013A follow-up that's both more consistent and more predictable. [Sep 2013, p.104]
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Jul 12, 2013Lynch may be devoting much of his time and passion to his new career as a musician, but The Big Dream still has a thin, larky feel, briefly amusing, consistently strange, but rarely resonant.
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Jul 16, 2013Over the course of the record’s 12 tracks, Lynch settles into an electro-blues groove as comfortable and consistent as he’s likely to get as a musician.
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Jul 12, 2013Lynch showcases a grim neighbourhood that seems electrically oppressed somehow, synthesised echoes murmuring like residual radiation.
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Jul 12, 2013This whole album feels less of an art stunt and more of a well-executed idea.
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Jul 12, 2013It's a sound with all flesh stripped off the bone, but Lynch himself sounds like an intellectual playing bogus trailer-trash.
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Jul 16, 2013Despite it being a visionary work from an artist seldom seen nowadays, The Big Dream is more cohesive, more coherent but all the less fearless because of it.
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Jul 15, 2013The mood darkens further here--Lynch's croon is mired deeper in dirgey, junkyard blues--and it's harder work too, which rather militates against the carefully crafted unease.
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Jul 19, 2013The Big Dream is vaguely interesting, but not very interesting.
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The WireAug 15, 2013A series of one-dimensional tracks, produced by Dean Hurley, that at their best sound like a karaoke outsider artist running though some vocal exercises. [Aug 2013, p.54]
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Aug 1, 2013The Big Dream is but a pretty stone that withers the moment it is touched, lifted for further inspection.
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UncutJul 31, 2013What's here feels a bit decaffeinated, downbeat Moby-ish electronica over which Lynch speaks or sings in a shaky blues croon. [Sep 2013, p.91]
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Jul 24, 2013This is an unrelentingly difficult record, with all semblances of pop music and even melody eschewed for a Hound of the Baskervilles trudge through a gothic swamp.
User score distribution:
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Positive: 12 out of 15
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Mixed: 1 out of 15
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Negative: 2 out of 15
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Jul 17, 2013
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Aug 8, 2013