Ryan's Chad VanGaalen review

A comparison I've often heard is that great albums are like great novels – they tell a cohesive story with recurring thematic elements and motifs, and have one overall message that the artist is trying to communicate. No doubt this is often true, but what a lot of music fans tend to overlook is that it's not exclusively true, there are some great albums that are more like short story collections, where a bunch of very different songs are put together with no connection other than the artist creating them. The Beatles' white album and REM's Out of Time are great examples of the latter, and Chad VanGaalen's Soft Airplane is another good example.

As with any short story collection, you really have to consider each song on its individual merits. This can be both a blessing and a curse – if the songs are good, it makes the whole thing seem that much better, but it's harder to justify bad songs than it would be with a more concept-type album. Luckily, with this one, there aren't really any bad songs on here; they range from excellent (Bare Feet on Wet Griptape, City of Electric Light) to at its worst only fairly good (Frozen Energon, Phantom Anthills). Even those “weaker” songs on the album can only be described as such in relation to the other songs on the album – compared to most songs that appear on most albums released, they're still fairly strong tunes.

If I had one quibble with the album, it's that VanGaalen tends to wear his influences on his sleeve – most of the songs tended to remind me of songs by other artists, but done in a way that is evocative, rather than derivative. There's quite a range of those influences, as well; I heard strains of everything from Dylan, to Gord Downie's solo work, to Nine Inch Nails, to Edwyn Collins' modern classic Girl Like You. VanGaalen's clearly someone with a great love of music, and it shows throughout the album.

Chad VanGaalen's eventually going to build up a huge, 'mainstream success' name for himself, at some point in the future if not with this album. Maybe it'll come after appearing on the soundtrack of a popular indie film, a la Kimya Dawson on Juno, so you might as well check him out now, so you can tell your friends that you've been listening to him for years. The fact that you'll get to listen to some great tunes at the same time doesn't hurt at all, either.