Angelo Badamelenti - Twin Peaks: Fire Walk With Me - OST

A colleague once said to me that regardless of your view on the David Lynch prequel movie Fire Walk With Me, there could be no arguing that the soundtrack for it is just simply incredible. I'm inclined to agree, as an avid Twin Peaks fan, my opinion on the jarringly bleak (and sans Mark Frost!) film seems to change daily. I cannot however, find fault with the hauntingly brilliant soundtrack, which was mainly composed by the legendary Angelo Badamelenti and features the usual collaborators such as Lynch himself, Julee Cruise and for one particularly poignant track, the late Jimmy Scott. 

First off, please don't think that the entire score of the film appears on this record. Like the records released for Twin Peaks seasons 1 & 2, there are quite a number of omissions here (in fact there are hours upon hours of tracks recorded for Twin Peaks which were released online by David Lynch long after the demise of the show). Confusingly, the beautiful "Sycamore Trees", which featured in the Twin Peaks TV show, not the movie, appears here on this soundtrack album. Similarly, the track "Deer Meadow Shuffle", which is from the movie Fire Walk With Me, doesn't appear here but ends up on the season 3 soundtrack album released this year (25 years later!). What the hell?

The bizarre irregularities aside, the Fire Walk With Me soundtrack as a whole is a morose trip through both moody and swinging jazz, dotted with intense synthesizer soundscape passages and incredible guest vocal appearances. It is something, that despite being out of my usual field of listening, gets a lot of plays from me. The title track itself is simply unforgettable. 

On a final note, be wary of the recent vinyl represses of this soundtrack. Various reports on sites such as Discogs or in the Amazon comments section reveal a whole host of problems with the coloured discs.