Chad VanGaalen - Infiniheart

Chad VanGaalen
Infiniheart

Chances are quite good that you’ve heard of Chan VanGaalen by now, or you’re about to hear his songs this year. The Calgary busker turned Sub Pop signee has enjoyed a good amount of well-deserved press lately. I got sent a copy of his debut Infiniheart awhile back and I’ve been listening to it quite a bit, though I only got to write up about it now.

Earlier in his career, VanGaalen would simply record his own CD-Rs full of his music on a multitrack recorder and then sell or hand these limited editions out at shows and to his friends. The undeniable quality of the music got a buzz going, and it didn’t take long for major indies to come a-sniffin’.

On his debut, he is equally adept at soaring indie rock on songs like “Clinically Dead” (which I feel really recalls The Shins), dusty porch folk a la Will Oldham on “After the Afterlife” and pseudo Postal Service electronics on “Kill Me In My Sleep”. And that’s only the first 3 songs on the album! “J.C.’s Head On The Cross” mutters along like some Folk Implosion outtake, while “Somewhere I Know There Is Nothing” has a My Morning Jacket vibe going. The rest of the songs are all equally inventive and quirky in their genre shifting.

VanGaalen is quite capable of vocal skyscraping… like James Mercer of the Shins and maybe even Neil Young, this seems to be the range he is able to project emotion best.

The 16 songs on the CD are little music pastiches that are more complete than say Guided By Voices’ 1 minute snippets, but less orchestral than Badly Drawn Boy. VanGaalen is extremely prolific; the CD actually contains selected songs from what he estimates as hundreds of hours worth of recorded material. The band-in-a-box mentality is there but the music doesn’t suffer at all from it, perhaps due to the fact that he’s chosen the songs carefully.

In any case, Infiniheart definitely sounds like it may be the start of a really promising new phase in VanGaalen’s musical career - one in which he gets to play to more than just people on the street.

by Bryan