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2020 was a terrible year for gardening. It was terrible for peppers, it was terrible for tomatoes, it was terrible for the condition of the soul. But Chad VanGaalen somehow raised a garden all the same: carrots and sprouts and broccoli and a revivifying new album, all of them grown at home. He likes to eat directly off the plant, he says—”I get down on my knees and graze. It’s nice to feel the vegetables in your face”—and the 13 songs on World’s Most Stressed Out Gardener were harvested with just such a spirit: in their raw state, young and vegetal, at the very moment, they were made.
What that means is that the Calgary songwriter’s new album is a psychedelic bumper crop. A collection of tunes that does away with obsessiveness, the anxiety of perfectionism, in favor of freshness and immediacy — capturing the world as it was met while recording alone at home over a period of years. “Don’t overthink it,” VanGaalen told himself again and again, despite the push/pull love/hate of his relationship with songwriting. “I’m always trying to get outside of the song—but then I realize I love the song.”
This is a record that gleams with VanGaalen’s musical signatures: found sound, reverb, polychromatic folk music that is by turns cartoonish and hyperphysical—like ultra magnified footage of a virus or a leaf. Apparently, the LP began life as a “pretty minimal” flute record. (There’s only a vestige now, on “Flute Peace”—one of three instrumentals.) Later it became an electronic record “for a while” and finally, “right at the last second,” it “turned into a pile of garbage.” The good kind of garbage: glinting, useful, free. Music as compost—leaves, and branches ready to be re-ingested by the earth, turned into a flower.
Throughout these 40 minutes, VanGaalen floats from mania to solace to oblivion, searching for zen in all the wrong places. “Turn up the radio / I think we’re dead,” he sings on “Nothing Is Strange”; or, on the inside-out rocker “Nightmare Scenario”: “You’re stressed out when you should be feeling very well.” The singer’s mental landscape is rotting and redemptive, beautiful in spite of itself—and his soundscapes reflect this fertile decay. He has been influenced by his instrumental work on TV scores (Dream Corp’s third season began this fall), but still “nothing can really replace the human voice,” he admits. Like Arthur Russell or Syd Barrett, it’s VanGaalen’s vocals that shine a path through the swampland—from the cello-lashed “Water Brother” to “Starlight”’s krautrock pipe-dream.
These days, VanGaalen cherishes the privacy of the studio, the capacity to wander around, get distracted, and “move at the speed of life.” Whereas once he would obsess over mic techniques, now he puts the microphone in the same place every time—trying to capture a song quickly, the idea at its heart. He’ll act on his infatuations—for the flute, a squeaky clarinet, his basement’s copper plumbing (remade into xylophones for “Samurai Sword”)—and then he’ll try to get out, “veering away from responsibility,” before he overdoes his stay.
In the end, it’s like gardening. You have to live with your horrible decision-making; the weather’s going to fuck you if it wants to; and if you plant a hundred heads of broccoli, “now you gotta eat a hundred heads of broccoli—or watch them go to seed.” But mostly VanGaalen just tries to be a deer: “I remember seeing some deer come out in the Okanagan Valley once,” he says, “watching them wait for a sunbeam to hit a perfect bunch of grapes—and then eating them right out of the sunbeam. I’d recommend that.”
You can do it too—taste the sun-swabbed grapes—when World’s Most Stressed Out Gardener is released on March 19, 2021.
- Chad VanGaalen
Canadian musician and singer-songwriter born in 1977 in Calgary, Alberta.
- Sunglaciers
<P>Like their name might suggest, Sunglaciers’ music blurs the boundaries between dazzling indie-rock melodicism and icy post-punk experimentation. On the Calgary quartet’s sophomore album, Subterranea, co-produced by hometown hero Chad VanGaalen and mixed by acclaimed engineer Mark Lawson (Arcade Fire, Yves Jarvis, The Unicorns), they carve out new sonic spaces with laser focus. While past releases found the band exploring a maximalist approach, these 13 songs emerge and vanish in rapid succession, never outstaying their welcome. </P><P> </P><P>“We tried to layer vertically instead of horizontally,” explains multi-instrumentalist Mathieu Blanchard. “Our last album Foreign Bodies and the EPs that came before it had lots of long songs with different parts drifting back and forth. For this album, we decided to strip our songs down to two or three minutes with only a few ideas in each of them.”</P><P> </P><P>Sunglaciers initially came together in 2017 as a collaboration between Blanchard and lead vocalist Evan Resnik, both of whom handle an array of instruments and co-production duties on Subterranea. As Blanchard completed his studies to become a doctor working in family medicine and addiction, and Resnik returned from a hitchhiking trip through France, the duo decided to form a new musical project. The past five years have found them steadily growing in popularity, sharing stages with acts such as Omni, Preoccupations, and Daniel Romano, while topping the charts of campus radio stations in Western Canada.</P><P> </P><P>When COVID-19 put Sunglaciers’ tour plans on pause, they shifted their focus to songwriting, dedicating 40-plus hours per week to music in the early months of 2020. Subterranea was recorded in the unusual location of On Air Studios, a professional voiceover studio owned by former member Bruce Crews. This extended timeframe taught them skills in engineering, while also allowing for experiments such as swapping the instruments that each member typically plays (an oblique strategy used on Portishead’s Third and David Bowie’s “Boys Keep Swinging”). Chad VanGaalen fleshed out the songs further with vocal and instrumental contributions, while the band welcomed other guests such as harpist Jennifer Crighton (Hermitess) and hip-hop/black metal vocalist Louis Cza (Roman66, The Black Greek God)</P><P> </P><P>The result is an urgent and cohesive full-length statement, drawing on influences from the high drama indie-rock of Deerhunter, Total Control’s post-punk tenacity, and the woozy grooves of BEAK>. “Avoidance” instantly ramps up the intensity with a nagging synth line and screeching violins from Laura Reid, a member of the Calgary Philharmonic Orchestra. Its lyrics introduce the album’s themes of alienation, feeling abandoned but also culpable, with Resnik describing the song as “a stranded panic anthem.” The ’90s rock sound of “Glue'' shows off an entirely different side of Sunglaciers’ sonic personality, merging triumphant Walkmen-esque trumpets with a ripping guitar solo from VanGaalen. “Draw Me In” toys with the formula to the greatest degree, as a sputtering Four Tet-inspired dance beat propels Resnik’s vulnerable lyrics about untying the noose of depression during his darkest days.</P><P> </P><P>“The bulk of this album came together during the pandemic and the changing of gears that we had to do,” says Resnik. “I was out of work and Mathieu was working half as much as usual, so we had lots of time on our hands. We flipped a switch and started playing music every day. It’s a good indicator of how we were writing at the time while we wrapped our heads around some new gear and saw what came out of it. Essentially, we took all of our favourite musical tendencies and mashed them up into one thing.”</P>
