Blue Velvet (Original Motion Picture Soundtrack)

Beautiful and strange, the score to David Lynch's Blue Velvet is a staggering surrealist's nightmare told with the heart of a saint. Dense orchestrations float along whispers of dark, unnerving melodies; an astounding sense of menace coils inside even the most reassuring of moments. This marked the first collaboration between Lynch and Angelo Badalamenti, and its fusion of the sublime and the dangerous is breathtaking. There are Bernard Herrmann violin slashes, revisited classics (Roy Orbison's "In Dreams," Bobby Vinton's title track), and the peak of the whole experience, "Mysteries of Love." This Mortal Coil turned down requests to use their beloved version of "Song to the Siren," but Badalamenti manages to construct a piece of such simplicity, of such beauty, that you wonder why a composer didn't create it before in the first place. Brutally compelling, like one of Jeffrey Beaumont's own mysteries, this is an extraordinary experience filled with both fear and love.