It took me a week to write about him! Chad VanGaalen was playing in the middle of the afternoon at Filter’s Culture Collide last Sunday, and I guess it was too much awesome weirdness to digest at once, since I did not know what to do with what I had heard… There were a lot of dissonance and distortion in his music and, as the afternoon was mostly filled by sets from bands going into the disco-dance groove (which kind of sounds all the same for me), I was immediately interested by VanGaalen’s dark and bizarre rhythms. Once home, I listened to his last album ‘Diaper Island’ (terrible title, but he just had a baby), and was left clueless, more intrigued than anything, but could not decide if I really like this guy.
I know now! With three layered guitars, his psychedelic pop-rock was sometimes disconcerting, odd and angry like for ‘Burning Photographs’, or ‘Blonde hash’, some aggressive numbers almost Nirvana-style, ending in long distorted-noise guitar jams, but there were also the totally melodious songs, like ‘Sara’, unbelievably catchy at the first listening, slowly diffusing serenity and loveliness.
After having listened to his last album a few times, I would say that his fascinating sonic world is quite large, eccentric and eclectic at the same time, and transpire all over the place, with hard and grating sounds à la Sonic Youth or Pavement (‘Peace on the rise’), to experimental noise reminiscent of early Beck (‘Can you believe it?’), to freaky folk that you would expect to belong to Devendra Banhart’s first albums (‘Heavy Stones’ or ‘No Panic/no heat’ or even ‘Shave my pussy’). The whole thing undoubtedly grows on you, once you are used to the shifts and the unexpected detours the songs can take.
On stage, Chad VanGaalen was quite static, way too occupied at getting all this noise from his guitar, even breaking a string on stage and cutting his finger on it!
It’s difficult to know why this Calgary-based musician, prolific as he is, is not more well-known. Did you say prolific? Indeed, I read on Straight.com that he is about to release 11 records!!
‘As we speak, I’m working on 11 records that I’m going to release very soon. They should be up on the Sub Pop and the Flemish Eye websites, hopefully, within the next week. So maybe people will finally stop bugging me,’ he told to the website
But some of these albums will consist of experimental electronic sounds, the same kind he does for his side project ‘Black Mold’, and stuff he recorded outside, like railway noises. And to top all this, he is going to sell them as downloads, or as cassette tapes, which seem to have made a come back lately:
‘I’ve recently acquired a really good tape duplicator’, he declared to the straight, ‘So I’m kind of back to the way I was doing it when I was 16 or 17, which works a lot easier for me.’ This says a lot about his DIY punk ethics,
This Culture Collide's schedule was actually funny, a sort of Women against Men,… I explain: VanGaalen also owns the Flemish Eye label, and has produced the Calgary art rock band Women, something I did not obviously know when I left the stage after his set to go to see the band MEN on the other stage.