AEM081 Chad VanGaalen

There’s some­thing endear­ing about music that always seems to be on the verge of falling apart. We’re not talk­ing mass destruc­tion, like if Iron Maiden’s infra­struc­tural back­line sud­denly started melt­ing down, but a series of smaller cat­a­stro­phes: the gui­tar goes out of tune, the home­made elec­tron­ics begin to shoot sparks and smoke into the audi­ence, the legs of the organ go out like a buf­falo shot from a stage­coach. You get the idea pretty much every time you go to a local band show­case in some smaller city in the North­east, that heart-thunk moment of Oh shit! when the drum­mer starts solo­ing mid-verse and the rest of the band exchanges awk­ward glances, or when the iPod some­how falls out of the chip­tune dude’s back pocket. If music is about control—tight pants, tech­nol­ogy, etc.—these are the rough times when entropy turns the mixer all the way to suck.

But, as free jazz and Cage and Lucky Drag­ons and Mix Mas­ter Mike all prove, the hard-wired human fear of chaos can go both ways. Some­times, the Oh shit! moment, in the right hands, can be infi­nitely more exhil­a­rat­ing than super-tight stu­dio pro­fes­sion­al­ism. You lose con­trol of your inter­nal metronome and embrace the ter­ror of the void.

Chad Van­Gaalen, who has a name like a Dutch trance pro­ducer and the chased-by-wolves voice bizarro of the Meat Puppet’s Curt Kirk­wood, has a promo photo of him­self sit­ting alone in what appears to be his back­yard, sur­rounded by odd gadget-y cre­ations, play­ing a Casio and stick­ing his fin­ger into a nest of wires. It’s a scary scene, not only for the rus­tic hell­ish­ness I typ­i­cally asso­ciate with lawns cov­ered in busted-up machines, but also because the whole thing looks like it’s sec­onds away from explod­ing. I don’t know if Canada—VanGaalen’s from Cal­gary— has looser laws regard­ing these kinds of hi-tech sup­plies, but if I wasn’t lis­ten­ing to this guy’s music and lov­ing it, I might be tempted to drop a line to Interpol.

Still, to para­phrase the Supreme Court, “If it looks like a duck, it must be a duck.” In Van­Gaalen’s case, too, what you see is what you get. If you, like me, get a hard on for home­made rave gear, that’s a really good thing. Lis­ten­ing to these cuts, B-sides of 2008’s Soft Air­plane (Flem­ish Eye), you get a sense of how the weird, the out-of-sync and the questionably-conceived can metas­ta­size in genius ways. None of it sounds right. But it all sounds so good.

It’s some­times dif­fi­cult to imag­ine music being made—let alone blogged—these days with­out a heavy dose of generic cal­cu­la­tion. Call it search term tyranny, but I can’t remem­ber the last band that got hyped based on some­thing other than some kind of osten­ta­tious gim­mick. This prob­a­bly has to do with any num­ber of things: the grow­ing unim­por­tance of local scenes, the indie set’s own dic­ta­to­r­ial ideas of ironic PR. But weren’t things just a lit­tle weirder before the mp3? Not weird in a way that you can cat­e­go­rize, but just sub­ver­sively, invis­i­bly weird, like Dylan’s Base­ment Tapes or Sebadoh III, music that sounds off the way a slight case of jaun­dice might make a per­son look more unat­trac­tive than you remem­ber. Per­haps VanGaalen’s found the workaround to this unan­tic­i­pated side-effect of dig­i­tal dis­tri­b­u­tion in that pile of cir­cuits in his back­yard, but there’s this cas­sette era warped-ness in his tunes, an off-kilter mal­func­tion that haunts the music like a ghost in the speaker cab­i­net. Some­where between nos­tal­gia and a full-on pol­ter­geist con­fronta­tion, this guy has mas­tered that elu­sive and alien dis­com­fort that makes old Sub Pop com­pi­la­tions so hor­ri­fy­ing and cool. Do you remem­ber Cat Butt, Terry Lee Hale, the Thrown Ups? If you do, you prob­a­bly know what I’m talk­ing about. If not, I sug­gest you do some fuck­ing research!

A-side (or maybe AB-side) “Pyra­mids Float” is, despite it’s hal­lu­cino­genic title, pretty close to folk music, or at least the kind of folk music that would emerge from a com­mu­nity raised on cow punk rar­i­ties col­lec­tions and whose Bar Mitzvah’s included an oblig­a­tory demon­stra­tion of syn­the­sizer atmos­pher­ics. Van­Gaalen nails that mid­dle ground between rock dynamism and clin­i­cal para­noia that makes so many mid-80s indie pop records such awe­some lis­tens. With a jerky rhythm like a fail­ing motor and a cho­rus that wouldn’t seem par­tic­u­larly out of place on a Jaw­box record, this song is at once almost sci­en­tif­i­cally close to a metic­u­lously archi­tected crossover sin­gle, and tech­ni­cally sketchy, like an ine­bri­ated robot, circuit-bent to per­form karaoke on com­mand and nurs­ing the dam­age with pints after pints of mediocre beer.

“Stuffed Ani­mal,” on the other hand, comes across as a kind of deranged house music designed to be played exclu­sively at regional kiddy cir­cuses. Imag­ine if the eclec­tic ingre­di­ents of drum-machine chat­ter, Raincoat’s-style pre-K melodic sen­si­bil­i­ties, a children’s cho­rus, and VanGaalen’s own second-hand auto-detune some­how con­gealed into an acetate dub­plate that you could only play on an orange and blue Fisher Price record player. The bat­shit appeal here is tremen­dous. The tune bounces, but sadly, self-reflexively, like a trunk beat for all kinds of uni­ver­sal pre-adolescent baggage.

Van­Gaalen wards off Armaged­don for the dura­tion of these tracks, but just barely. I haven’t seen a car acci­dent for a cou­ple of years, but this is the kind of stuff that makes me want to pay closer atten­tion to the more wrecked parts of the world, the things that don’t fit together, the mis­takes that end up becom­ing big­ger parts of who you are than any num­ber of right deci­sions. Van­Gaalen starts by break­ing a for­mula. He ends by break­ing your heart.

Ben Las­man

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