The Way of All Flesh
Axiomatically speaking, space was once the final frontier. But ever since Laika was punched through the atmosphere in her canine coffin, space has been too tangible, too physical a realm to be mankind’s ultimate great unknown. For sentient mammals, there’s only one frontier whose finality seems truly final: death. On his third album, ramshackle Canadian songsmith Chad VanGaalen —armed with his usual rag-tag assemblage of self-styled instruments and ad-hoc arrangements— throws himself headlong into a lyrical study of the human post-mortem experience.
VanGaalen, for starters, challenges the notion of death as a death sentence, as one almighty black period bringing things to an eternal full-stop. He forthrightly asserts his stance on the set’s charming, banjo-plucking opener “Willow Tree,” singing, simply: “when I’m dead/ it’s when I’ll be free."
Across Soft Airplane, death is a constant: VanGaalen evoking both the physical cycle of birth/death/rebirth and the disembodied possibilities of an emancipated spirit with equal romanticism. Across the disc, we hear the tall Canadian crooning, in his creaky, throaty voice, lines like “no one knows where we go/ when we’re dead/ when we’re dreaming” and “when it’s all over/ and there’s nothing but the feeling/ we’ll be living on inside the molecules” and “weeds and trees that grow from seed/ will cover us in time.”
One (Finale)
This recurrent, persistent thematic thread —one that fearsomely addresses what is, for many people, still a fairly taboo topic— accomplishes the not-so-easy feat of stitching together the record as a whole. In what’ll be no surprise for those who’ve listened to either of VanGaalen’s previous Sub Pop discs (2004’s Infiniheart and 2006’s Skelliconnection), his latest longplayer is again assembled from odd, fragmentary, stylistically-dissimilar songs; the transitions from hesitant guitar strumming to zapping homemade electronics still, if taken on a purely tonal basis, quite jarring.
Yet, where that gave VanGaalen’s past works a scrapbook'd, collagist kind of feeling, the clear, openly-articulated subject-matter of Soft Airplane gives this record a feeling of inescapable intent. That’s not to say that, this time, the swift shift from, say, the fancy-footed, casiotonic beats-and-bleeps of the ridiculous “TMNT Mask” to the stark murder-ballad “Molten Light” isn’t a grinding gear-change
But, by keeping the grim spectre of mortality lingering over an entire set of songs, VanGaalen imbues everything with an inescapable sense of premeditation and focus. Which means that, in the wash, all the cobbled-together mismatches of instruments don’t diminish from a sense of a continuous whole; VanGaalen, for the first time, authoring an album that plays like an album.
Record Label: Sub Pop
Release Date: 9 September 2008
