Sometimes we want the sounds of the city, sometimes we want the sounds of the country. Ours being a suburban republic, now and then we want both, and few musicians are better at this union of sensibility than Chad VanGaalen. The one-time busker from Calgary has a knack for summoning a virginal rural past with his picking and strumming, a dreamy patch of woodland, though he can also work up a mean batch of richly abrasive experiments that bear little relation to the pastoral.
Part of the charm of VanGaalen's past two records, 2005's Infiniheart and 2006's Skelliconnection, arose in their sense of looseness and disorder, which came through in the lyrics, the sequencing, and the textures. Both releases drew from an archive of home recordings; consistency would be tough to fake. But on his latest release, he gathers a handful of songs recorded around the same time, in the same place (his basement), with the same equipment ("primarily on an old tape machine and a JVC ghetto blaster," according to the press notes). Small wonder that, with Soft Airplane, VanGaalen finally attains a uniformity of sound and theme that can hold his gorgeously fractured songs together. Past the numberless instruments, styles, and guises, the solid form of Chad VanGaalen is now visible.
Neil Young meets Thurston Moore, an irresistible comparison to draw, does touch the heart of VanGaalen's aesthetic. The emotionally cracked falsetto, the nerdy forays into science fiction, the death-instinct, the longing, and the very metropolitan impatience with harmony and quiet are all there. We see this as we slip into "Molten Light", a murder ballad in the vein of Young's "Down by the River", as VanGaalen sings, "I dumped her body into the molten light/ It floated to the surface and it did not ignite." He shot his baby, but unlike Neil's gunman, he watches her rise out of the water to sort him out. Equally morose, bearing another final-resting-place title, "Willow Tree" describes death as liberating as he reflects on hangings and Viking funerals over a twanging banjo.
Which isn't to say that the ratty glimpse of the future, the glitch and crunch of his on-the-cheap production, is no longer there. He keeps the rainbow of precious instruments-- jury-rigged drum machine, analog synths, accordions-- only now the choices feel smarter, more attuned to each song's spirit. Fuzzed around the edges, thick with mood, the Thurston Moore-like "Bare Feet on Wet Griptape" whizzes by on its careening guitars and melodic hooks. Clearly VanGaalen wants to keep his grip on a pop sensibility, even if it's in the warped form of a no wave jam. With its curious pairings of harmonica and synthesizer, "Phantom Anthills" and "TMNT Mask" drift further away from the countryside, all the way onto the dancefloor-- or rather VanGaalen's skewed vision of a dancefloor.
These gestures toward a wider audience aren't free of VanGaalen's chronic morbidity. Where we do it in our thoughts, or on our anonymous blogs, this man thinks about death with his instruments. Now he's just going easier on the ears. We see this on the charismatic "Cries of the Dead", which artfully fleshes out the fixation on death that has marked all of his work, with the help of pop flourishes and patterns. In a matter of minutes, listeners are shuttled from the sight of a man beating his dog, to a memory of gazing upon a lover's painting of mountains and feeling like he was there. The song distills the essence of Soft Airplane, an intimate, intelligent, and always transporting cycle of songs that sends VanGaalen closer to his own voice and, in the process, closer to us.
