Chad VanGaalen has been consistent about his favorite track on Light Information, the sixth proper album from the prolific Calgary-based multimedia auteur and one of his finer efforts yet. Invariably, his pick is “Prep Piano and 770,” the one instrumental. As the title hints, it’s based on prepared piano and a Korg 770 monosynth. All of its contemplative chimes and retrofuturist squiggles are inspired by a floating bell that can be heard and, apparently, seen from the outhouse near a rustic cabin where the VanGaalen family goes (and, um, goes) on summer vacation. And no, before you ask, it’s actually track number three.
Since Sub Pop picked up VanGaalen’s bedroom-recording collection Infiniheart a dozen years ago, the warbling-voiced singer and impressively wide-ranging songwriter has kept tinkering with his warped noise-pop sensibility, as much mad scientist as one-man band. VanGaalen’s previous solo album, 2014’s invitingly easy-going Shrink Dust, could span pedal-steel plaintiveness and comic-book grotesquerie in a single song. VanGaalen is also an accomplished animator and illustrator. Shrink Dust was partly billed as a soundtrack to what would be his 2015 film Tarboz, and VanGaalen has directed videos for Sub Pop labelmates including Metz and Shabazz Palaces. These days, much of his musical work is in the form of his hallucinatory scores for Adult Swim’s “Dream Corp LLC.” Writing a traditionally structured song, he has said, doesn’t come so easily to him anymore.
Produced and almost entirely performed by VanGaalen, Light Information demonstrates he still has an uncanny knack for off-kilter songcraft, while also gently questioning the societal pressures that might lead us to miss the point of creating and appreciating art in the first place. If, as VanGaalen has said, the overarching theme of Light Information is to somehow escape from technology, the end feeling is less “infinite content” than “cultivate your garden.”
The origins of Light Information predate Shrink Dust, and it’s a fittingly murkier-sounding and more riotous work, hewing closer to synth-streaked fist-pumpers like “Replace Me” from 2011’s Diaper Island or “Bare Feet on Wet Griptape” from 2008’s Soft Airplane. But the hooks still strike bloody vein. VanGaalen’s calamitous best here includes the galvanizing apocalyptic opener “Mind Hijacker’s Curse,” with its water-bong sound effects, bah-bah-ing “she’s got nobody” refrain, and what might be the album’s thesis statement on the fickleness of time: “Time just can’t be trusted,” VanGaalen frets. Spacier but no less urgent is “Host Body,” where VanGaalen imagines “parasitic demons” that “eat me from the inside out,” which he has said relates to time “turning you into a different person.” First single “Old Heads” has a chorus so jaunty it could be missed that it’s a sci-fi vision of transhuman cyborgs.
VanGaalen’s melancholy moments, when they come, are as gut-wrenching as ever, no matter how carefully cloaked in sardonic humor. The folksier, comparatively pared-down “You Fool” opens with a “semen-coated television controller thrown into a dirty hotel room corner,” and the unapologetic narrator volunteering to sleep on the floor. But the subtle showstopper is “Broken Bell,” where VanGaalen can offhandedly mention needing to visit a father who’s dying of cancer and then nudge a live audience into warm laughter by musing, “Should I take the advice of the graffiti on the wall telling me to go suck it?” It’s a Sufjan Stevens- or Mount Eerie-level meditation on mortality, despite VanGaalen concluding, “I’m not really good at this.”
One risk with mud-caked home recordings by indie oddballs is they can tend to blur together. “Golden Oceans” gunks up its sing-song melodies enough for early Wavves or Times New Viking. “Faces Lit” girds elliptical tech observations in rickety churn that could fit along a continuum with Built to Spill and Deerhunter. The anxious “Locked in the Phase” brings to mind happily revived Ontario indie heroes Constantines, whose lead singer Bry Webb had the B-side of VanGaalen’s one-off “Primitive Brain” single last year. “Mystery Elementals” is another scuzzy rumination on time’s inscrutability. Each of these is solid but doesn’t quite hold up to the album’s highlights.
A last-minute addition to the album, the fluttery finale “Static Shape” is also one of its sunniest songs—and VanGaalen’s. “Carve a shape into the static, and try to remember all the beautiful magic,” he sings, amid burbling electronic percussion and backing vocals from his two daughters. “Try to remember as much as I can and not to lose faith in my fellow kind.” It’s a gorgeous summation of why VanGaalen, in interviews and press materials, can seem more interested in ambient drone or gardening or architecture or, the nerve, his friends and family than feeding or monitoring the content mills. Like Jonathan Richman, VanGaalen doesn’t have a cellphone. But he has faith that if he follows his weird muse, opens up his mind in a way that a few people who are receptive to it might apprehend, that static will take shape, strike a chord. As usual, it may take a few listens, but he’s right. “Prep Piano and 770” isn’t really the best track, but it best captures that humbly optimistic spirit, like tranquil tones and breathtaking vistas observed from a shitter.
