Description
First pressing on coloured vinyl!!! A clear w/gold, red, blue high melt.
2020 was a terrible year for gardening. It was terrible for peppers, it was terrible for tomatoes, it was terrible for the condition of the soul. But Chad VanGaalen somehow raised a garden all the same: carrots and sprouts and broccoli and a revivifying new album, all of them grown at home. He likes to eat directly off the plant, he saysI get down on my knees and graze. Its nice to feel the vegetables in your faceand the 13 songs on Worlds Most Stressed Out Gardener were harvested with just such a spirit: in their raw state, young and vegetal, at the very moment, they were made. What that means is that the Calgary songwriters new album is a psychedelic bumper crop. A collection of tunes that does away with obsessiveness, the anxiety of perfectionism, in favor of freshness and immediacy capturing the world as it was met while recording alone at home over a period of years. Dont overthink it, VanGaalen told himself again and again, despite the push/pull love/hate of his relationship with songwriting. Im always trying to get outside of the songbut then I realize I love the song. This is a record that gleams with VanGaalens musical signatures: found sound, reverb, polychromatic folk music that is by turns cartoonish and hyperphysicallike ultra magnified footage of a virus or a leaf. Apparently, the LP began life as a pretty minimal flute record. (Theres only a vestige now, on Flute Peaceone of three instrumentals.) Later it became an electronic record for a while and finally, right at the last second, it turned into a pile of garbage. The good kind of garbage: glinting, useful, free. Music as compostleaves, and branches ready to be re-ingested by the earth, turned into a flower. Throughout these 40 minutes, VanGaalen floats from mania to solace to oblivion, searching for zen in all the wrong places. Turn up the radio / I think were dead, he sings on Nothing Is Strange; or, on the inside-out rocker Nightmare Scenario: Youre stressed out when you should be feeling very well. The singers mental landscape is rotting and redemptive, beautiful in spite of itselfand his soundscapes reflect this fertile decay. He has been influenced by his instrumental work on TV scores (Dream Corps third season began this fall), but still nothing can really replace the human voice, he admits. Like Arthur Russell or Syd Barrett, its VanGaalens vocals that shine a path through the swamplandfrom the cello-lashed Water Brother to Starlights krautrock pipe-dream. These days, VanGaalen cherishes the privacy of the studio, the capacity to wander around, get distracted, and move at the speed of life. Whereas once he would obsess over mic techniques, now he puts the microphone in the same place every timetrying to capture a song quickly, the idea at its heart. Hell act on his infatuationsfor the flute, a squeaky clarinet, his basements copper plumbing (remade into xylophones for Samurai Sword)and then hell try to get out, veering away from responsibility, before he overdoes his stay. In the end, its like gardening. You have to live with your horrible decision-making; the weathers going to fuck you if it wants to; and if you plant a hundred heads of broccoli, now you gotta eat a hundred heads of broccolior watch them go to seed. But mostly VanGaalen just tries to be a deer: I remember seeing some deer come out in the Okanagan Valley once, he says, watching them wait for a sunbeam to hit a perfect bunch of grapesand then eating them right out of the sunbeam. Id recommend that.
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