Review Summary: are you unaware that you are close to tears
Over the last eight years I've become painfully aware of my parents' decline. Sometimes I'll visit them, and while I'm talking to my father, I'll notice my mother struggling to balance portion sizes for her guests while dishing up food. She'll shift the same potato from plate to plate, and every meal I attend, the process seems to take longer. I feel a haze of fear like the swell of insect conversation in the nights I cannot sleep. I imagine I'll lose my faculties, that my parents will lose theirs. I see lights in windows across the road, or restlessness my neighbour's garage, and I wonder if the same anxiety is perched like a gargoyle on everyone's mantle.
Vundabar's latest,
Devil For The Fire, is partly inspired by lead singer Brandon Hagen's recent interest in neurology. Much of the literature he was reading at the time of writing the material was about stroke recovery. As the band was about to record, his father ironically and tragically suffered a heart attack that resulted in a stroke. Hagen would exist in a strange netherworld of COVID tests, hospital visits, and recording sessions.
I'm not overly familiar with the band's output - having briefly run through some of their older material, I detect a nervous, awkward energy. This latest record has a tone more akin to their last album
Either Light. The sequencing takes you by the hand, and the songs look back at you to check if you can feel what's being communicated. Perhaps the performances are more clear or more unguarded because of recent events. It's hard to tell, but the susurrus of the opener 'Aphasia' sets the mood, with its gentle downstrokes, soft drums and vocal that smacks of defeat. The lullaby imagery of being in a car without volition goes to a different place for the crescendo, almost as if the song is climbing the walls in a drugged, out of body state.
The band defuses the dreamy angst by slipping into a more comfortable groove on 'Ringing Bell', but there's still an angular break in the middle of the song hinting at unease. Apocalypse clouds the stuttering title track, and the song serves as an interesting counterpoint to some of the other tracks that have a feeling of abdication. Throughout the record Hansen sounds as if he's willing to let the river carry him along despite not signing the waiver. This surface numbness cannot hide an undercurrent of helpless anger in the first half of the album. The new wave stomp of highlight 'The Gloam' sees him intone that it's not so bad to run on empty, as there's a comforting promise of stopping without having to feel. The slingy guitar lick attack at the end would normally signal some sort of slacker malaise but on the restrained, driving thunder of the backing it sounds like grappling with that impulse to run and hide.
I wouldn't say that Vundabar are trailblazers - their sound has been mapped out before, but they're stretching themselves gracefully on this record. There's a new thematic drive, and almost a parting of the clouds in terms of the vulnerability I hear, while continuing with some of the smoother tones of their previous,
Either Light. Most importantly, this record may subtly remind us that we're all working through future grief, but it also that that's a universal, natural condition. Sing along, it's not only one voice on the chorus.
