Chris Isaak has made a career out of singing like Roy Orbison, looking sort of like Morrissey and acting in movies like That Thing You Do and Twin Peaks: Fire Walk with Me. His best records echo Orbison or Presley’s finest but just missed our current dark period of expensive fake-vintage recording—producers making bands play through restored 50-year-old mixers and computerized replicas of ancient machinery. (The product is almost always mismatched, awkward and obvious: no one is fooled, the record is forgotten.)

Instead—and I mean this as a sincere compliment—Isaak’s songs (the dark, surf-drenched “Blue Hotel” or the notoriously haunting “Wicked Game”) master the plastic-sounding late ‘80 and ‘90s hyper-production that ruined hundreds of otherwise great records. Either by design or accident, Isaak’s early albums—like the self-titled sophomore record or Heart Shaped World—channel the same bizarre, kind-of-scary aesthetic portrayed by the movies that feature his songs, such as David Lynch’s Blue Velvet and Wild at Heart or Tarantino’s True Romance. Sort of like the raw emotion you’d find in hearing “Save the Last Dance for Me” being done by a desperate Reno lounge singer, but with worlds more professionalism. On stage, Isaak is a showman of the sincerest stripe: he proudly dons piercingly loud suits that rival if not surpass the audacious golden getup Phil Ochs wore in his later years, and in the gaps between songs he jokes with the audience like he’s known them for years. When playing, he and his band don’t sound far off from the studio originals, which is as it should be. Isaak is probably the most popular artist that resonates that time: he’s an echo of an echo. By exemplifying that bizarre era of American culture, Isaak makes throwback rock a more compelling and original endeavor than it was probably ever intended to be.

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