Chad VanGaalen
Issue #29
Blessed (or cursed?) with almost a gazillion songs, the Canadian artist narrows down his fruitful collection for his latest album, Skelliconnection
By Mairead Case
Published: September 1st, 2006 | 12:00am
Chad VanGaalen resists labels, but if it’s necessary, you could call him “singer-songwriter.” He’s happiest as a one-man show (and used to make rent by busking on street corners in Calgary, Alberta), warble-zooming his way through complicated, restless love songs about “gubbish,” translucence, and bodiless brains. The accompaniment of choice is a bent-circuit toy keyboard, but VanGaalen adds harmonica, drums, and guitar, plus several electric and acoustic contraptions that he created in his basement studio.
VanGaalen is an almost ridiculously prolific artist. Like his 2005 album, Infiniheart, his latest album, Skelliconnection, is a collection of songs plucked from a library of hundreds. This is both a blessing and a curse — imagine what it must be like to have all these things whizzing through your head at once.
On the one hand, Skelliconnection is a star-bright bouquet of all things Chad. You get the sweet intimacy of “Sing Me to Sleep,” Daliesque choruses (“Red! Hot! Drops!”), and also “Flower Gardens,” a song that rocks harder and poppier than anything he’s ever recorded for the public. I looped it for days.
On the other hand, and paradoxically, Skelliconnection doesn’t give you a very good idea of what VanGaalen’s doing now. These days, he’s doing a lot of post-punky piano abstractions à la John Cage. There are a few of those here (the frantic and fabulous “Systematic Heart,” for example, or “Dandruff”’s quick pinpricks). I craved more, not because the others were subpar but because the electronic explosions are clearly where VanGaalen’s current passions lie. (To be fair, sometimes you make music to make rent, and those O.C. mixes aren’t exactly synthplosion-friendly.)
Even if you’re lucky enough to see the one-man show, you’re still missing some Chadness, because VanGaalen is a visual artist, too. Maybe you’ve seen his excellently morphing music videos, in which flying animals turn to hands, to bones, to blood. It’s like Russian nesting dolls gone down the rabbit hole. VanGaalen painted Skelliconnection’s cover (gray hoodie, mossy tree) during an afternoon in a Canadian rainforest. Sometimes, even Chad’s too quick for Chad. “I painted it like I was far away,” he says. “But I was really pretty close.”
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