Angelo Badalamenti - Blue Velvet (Original Motion Picture Soundtrack)

Angelo Badalamenti's music for Blue Velvet sounds like a picket-fence town with something terrible humming underneath, and this single LP restores the 1986 soundtrack that began one of cinema's great partnerships.

Badalamenti first came aboard David Lynch's film to help Isabella Rossellini with her singing and ended up writing the score. It was the start of a collaboration that would shape Twin Peaks and much of Lynch's later work, and you can already hear the signature here: swooning, old-fashioned romance played just slightly too slow, until it curdles into dread.

"Main Title" sets the tone with sweeping, mournful strings, while "Night Streets / Sandy and Jeffrey" glides between noir menace and innocence. "Frank" turns darker and more threatening, a musical portrait of the film's terrifying villain. The heart of the album is "Mysteries of Love", heard in instrumental and French horn versions before Julee Cruise sings it with Lynch's lyrics, floating like a dream half-remembered. The vintage songs Lynch made unforgettable sit alongside, including Roy Orbison's "In Dreams", Ketty Lester's "Love Letters" and Bill Doggett's "Honky Tonk, Part I", plus Rossellini's own smoky turn on the title song.

It is essential listening for Lynch devotees and lovers of film music alike. Few soundtracks capture a movie's strange heartbeat this completely.