I have seen VUM in action a few times and since Henry Rollins keeps mentioning them— he recently included their last album ‘Psychotropic Jukebox’ among his favorite albums of 2013, and Rollins does not have 3,000 favorite albums like Iman, he just has very few of them! – I got to see them again on Monday night, the during their residency at the Echo.
The band has effectively released a second full-length album and continues to cultivate their own mystery with this strange, lugubrious and hypnotic sound built by Jennifer Pearl’s unique monotonous and distant vocals, Christopher Badger’s throbbing-noir synths and Scott Spaulding’s sparse tropical drums. Honestly, I was expecting to spot Rollins front row, he plays them so much during his KCRW radio show, but no such chance! Bathed in a very dim greenish and purple-ish light, their music worked like droning incantations of noir psych-krautrock under a pale sun evocating both the tropics and the coldness of the Arctic Circle. If it’s difficult to identify VUM ‘s geography, it’s even harder to classify them, live, their sound is cavernous, and sometimes animated by a David-Lynch-Twin-Peaks vibrating guitar. They seem more interested by the atmospheric vibe of their haunting music than by making a hit, although they played their close-to-a-hit ‘Laura Palmer’, which embodies so well their cinematic influences.
Still, listening for an hour of VUM can be a bit macabre and be like chasing the echoing ghost behind Pearl’s non-emotive vocals while exploring distant places and exotic civilizations in a mind-dream, a bit as if you were in this ‘Avatar’ movie – without the big budget and the Hollywood special effects – but many people are in this kind of dangerous trip these days. Their set on Monday night was concluding their residency of this month, I have attended only one but I can imagine that all of them had this same darkwave vibe and tenebrous light. It’s certainly not music to cheer you up at the end of the year when you are reflecting on your past life, but it may rather make you take a mysterious time traveling machine to contemplate the mystics.
