Julian Casablancas (unassuming lead singer of a group you’ve probably never heard of) is said to be particularly adamant about the spaces that serves as transitions for the tracks on his records. CD's work that way. They’re solid chunks of audio material that should be seen holistically, and the relationship between one song and another—their chemistry, if you will—should not be understated.
The song you're hearing right now is called Flower Gardens . It's playing in the Galaxy Media Player above and to the right if you need to use the controls.
Some musicians record material to please themselves, but this is usually a step seen as audacious, especially after they’ve gained a following that often sees experimentation as betrayal. The reaction Bob Dylan got to going electric at the Newport Folk Festival is now the stuff rock legend is made of, and it’s a telltale example of many. Chad VanGaalen’s Infiniheart was an instant critics’ darling that garnered him somewhat of a cult following. Flower Gardens is the first song off his latest album, Skelliconnection, and it lays out the conditions of your listening experience to come immediately. The song opens with bleeps and dials and then bursts into a drum and electric guitar explosion that sounds like the noisy, symmetrical kind of rock that geeky boys in tight pants have produced as of late. In other words, it's non-VanGaalen music with the VanGaalen trademark, and it is, in many ways, the fine print of this record. If you have any fancy expectations for this record, let go of them and fast. Once you let go, you let go for good because the surprises keep on coming (the jazzy, the dancey, the folkey, the country, and the crappy are no strangers to Skelliconnection).
Burn 2 Ash ventures into broken-drunken-sullen low-fi territory. If the title seems like a nod to Digital Ash in a Digital Urn just listen to VanGaalen’s voice. Taking a complete detour from the first track, VanGaalen’s voice dips and takes a chameleonic turn a la Bright Eyes. As he convincingly whines, “I would hope for a true love, oh yeah, oh yeah”, his voice breaks, holding its own against the ambient hum.
See-Thru-Skin is hauntingly beautiful because it is a brainy, forlorn, almost existential offering that’s shyly upbeat that testifies to VanGaalen’s sharp-as-a-whip lyricism. He’s self-conscious (“I can see my veins right through my skin”) but the “yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah” that ends this track, show that he knows more than he lets on to.
There is no linear thematic sequence in Skelliconnetion, and where the absence of a blatant purpose was the charm of Infiniheart, it’s not flattering on his latest record. The result is a completely schizophrenic sort of record that’s messy and scattered, (but good) that ride the wave of a few songs (that are great).
VanGaalen is a spectacularly gifted and prolific songwriter who has an ear for cranking out unusual tunes from instruments and non-instruments alike. The resulting songs are purebreds. Skelliconnection has waaay too short an attention span, but hey, that’s something I know a thing or two about and, I reckon you do as well.
