Chad VanGaalen’s third album, Soft Airplane, is an excellent new release from Calgary label Flemish Eye and Seattle’s ever-awesome Sub Pop. It’s impressive, and not just speaking sound here, because it represents a singular effort, at the head of which is (you guessed it) Chad VanGaalen.
The mood of Soft Airplane’s thirteen songs cross the realm of organic atavism to decaying, cold technologies, due partially to the handmade instruments, tape deck and JVC speakers that he used to create the album. It’s worth noting that, according to legend, Chad has recorded hundreds of songs this way and that Infiniheart (his first album) is more or less a compilation of them, which explains its slightly schizophrenic nature.
That being said, VanGaalen’s Soft Airplane is a sonically cohesive album whose main theme is a fascination with death, a detail that is slightly less morbid than it is innocent and explorative (take, for example, the lyric “no one knows where we go / when we’re dead or when we’re dreaming” from Rabid Bits of Time).
Willow Tree, the first song on the album, begins with the unlikely pairing of banjo and accordion. In this song Chad sings “when I die / I’ll hang my head beside the willow tree / when I’m dead / is when I’ll be free”, setting the tone for the rest of the album.
The following track, Bones of Man, indicates a shift in the mood of the album as his raw vocals are paired with a churning guitar that’s heavy on the low end. Not content to leave his exploration of the significance of death on the personal level, Chad expands his questions to include the rest of mankind while managing to tastefully insert a xylophone into the keyboard solo for the sake of aural ambiance. He changes up some of the instrumentation on Phantom Anthills and Poisonous Heads, paving the way for more ambient and digitally driven songs like TMNT Mask and Old Man + The Sea.
It feels wrong to talk about this album without mentioning the artwork that accompanies it. In addition to writing and recording the album himself, VanGaalen finds the time to both illustrate the cover AND create animations for a few of the songs (which I highly recommend you check out on YouTube). His artistic talent reflects his approach to music, too, as he uses his insularity to create singular reproductions of the world around him.
This is pretty much what attracted me to his music in the first place, so it now seems fitting to wrap it up with a story I call “Mike Buying Soft Airplane”:
I was in Waterloo when I heard Poisonous Heads come on over the speakers. I don’t even know how to describe what it was I heard. It reminded me of mood music you might hear in the background at a coffee shop but not pay much attention to. The only difference was it was so strange that I had to find an employee and ask who it was. When I asked he got all excited and we agreed that we had never heard anything like it (except maybe Neil Young, but to just say “Hey, he sounds like Neil Young” seems like it would be a major oversight).
That’s pretty much what happened.
I realize my tale wasn’t that captivating but the main thing you should take away from it is this: Soft Airplane is literally the only album I’ve heard thirty seconds of, loved, bought immediately after, and been listening to ever since.
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