As music listeners, we are entering a moment where most of the records being released were recorded in apartments with files being sent between band members from a safe distance. Every band is the Postal Service now and the thought of being in a room with the rest of the unvaccinated Polyphonic Spree seems like an accordion that ain’t worth the squeeze. It’s a perfect time to be a bedroom-pop perfectionist. For Chad VanGaalen, it’s business as usual. This is where he thrives.
On his seventh album The World’s Most Stressed Out Gardener, the Calgary singer-songwriter, producer, multi-instrumentalist and renowned illustrator continues to walk his own righteous path with 13 homespun tracks that transport you to the unique recesses of his imagination.
While listening to any Chad VanGaalen project — including his fantastic production work with the influential pre-Preoccupations group Women — you become acutely aware of the environment surrounding each instrument. Sleigh bells rattle and echo, drums thud and creak as they’re struck; meanwhile, VanGaalen’s immediately recognizable quivering falsetto piercing through his everything-including-the-kitchen-sink arrangements.
To give you a sense of what his music sounds like on paper, it would be like if Neil Young and Devo actually made a record together using everything they found in that garage during Human Highway instead of trashing the place with one long freaked out “Hey Hey, My My” jam. Add in a splice of Sonic Youth’s open-tuned dissonance and some campfire acoustic strumming and you’d be somewhere near the ballpark. You can hear an amalgamation of all of these ingredients with the album’s opener “Spider Milk” as it transitions from a ramshackle folk stomp into a full on psych freakout with VanGaalen’s haunting harmonies gliding above like a newly displaced ghost.
The album as a whole favors more sprawling atmospherics and experimental instrumentation, leaving behind some of the fast-paced rave ups that VanGaalen introduced on albums like his 2011 opus Diaper Island. With three connective instrumental interludes that focus on the flute, synth and the cello — “Flute Peace.” “Earth from a Distance” and “Plant Music” — the songs unfurl at a relaxed bloom and only explode when it feels natural. Like all of his records, there are moments of overwhelming beauty that go hand in hand with his experimentation. Melodies on tracks like “Nothing Is Strange” and “Golden Pear” announce themselves like they have existed somewhere in your subconsciousness.
In press releases for this album, VanGaalen spoke about how he delved deep into gardening as an almost meditative practice that keeps him living “at the speed of life.” With too much or too little attention to crops, a gardener’s harvest can cause some serious stress.
A song that encapsulates this feeling is “Where Is It All Going.” With a slowly strummed acoustic and a sweet electric piano melody, you can hear a recording of birds chirping like they are resting on a branch outside of VanGaalen’s home studio. “These days keep rolling like everyone is the same,” he sings. “like every step you take is forcing the motion again.”
In a post-Fetch The Bolt Cutters “do-it-from-home” musical landscape, Chad VanGaalen’s beautifully warped world is due for a reexamination. With every release, VanGaalen is coming up with new ways to tend the soil.
Essential Tracks: “Flute Peace,” “Nothing Is Strange” and “Golden Pear”