Album Of The Week: Daughn Gibson Me Moan

Sometime in the late '80s or early '90s, David Lynch and cartoonishly handsome honky-tonk revivalist Chris Isaak inexplicably became good buds. Lynch used Isaak songs in Blue Velvet and Wild At Heart and directed a lesser-seen video for Isaak's immortal "Wicked Game" (the one without Helena Christensen in it). Then, Isaak played whatever passed for the lead role in Lynch's even-more-inscrutable-than-usual 1992 movie Twin Peaks: Fire Walk With Me, doing his best to project square-jawed authority in a dream universe where nothing made sense. This Lynch/Isaak connection was good for everyone, especially as both guys were at their creative and cultural peaks. Isaak's take on old-school country and rockabilly was already interacting fascinatingly with '80s production-sheen trends, and the Lynch association lent him a squirmy transgressive cool that prevented him from coming off like a cornball, always a danger for revivalists. And Isaak was actually pretty great in the Twin Peaks movie, giving the early scenes a quizzical gravity that Kyle MacLaughlan was no long able to offer the original show when it went off the rails. I don't know what happened to the Lynch/Isaak connection, and if Lynch is really interested in making clanking electronic 12-bar blues records (which he his), you'd think he might holler at Isaak to help him out. But absent that connection, we now have Daughn Gibson, who comes off like early-'90s Lynch and Isaak combined into one person, except beamed into 2013, given time to acclimate, and with a voice pitched-down a few octaves and cursed with a hideous accent.