Chad VanGaalen

Diaper Island

Reviews Pop & Rock May 17 2011

By Stephen CarlickChad VanGaalen is well known for his twisted, surreal take on pop music, but who the hell could've guessed he could do normal just as well? Of course, it would be lazy to throw a blanket statement over Diaper Island, not to mention wrong ― there's plenty of Chad VanGaalen's usual sonic tomfoolery, as evinced by the raucous "Can You Believe It!?" ― but there's a definite change in tone. Between Diaper Island's quirkier tracks lie ample moments of furrowed brow earnestness, as on the yearning "No Panic/No Heat" and dulcet album centrepiece "Sara." And it's in this mode that Diaper Island's highpoint of emotional resonance, the deceptive-titled "Shave My Pussy," comes; the song's goofy title belies its crushing sadness and poignancy, revealing VanGaalen's ability to imbue his idiosyncratic urges with powerful emotion. To keep balance, these introspective moments are tempered by instances of pure ecstatic release: the rollicking "Replace Me" is another album highlight and "Freedom For A Policeman" is peppered with grandiose choruses of the word "freedom" that beg for lighters live. VanGaalen's been crafting albums since 2009's Soft Airplane, but it took four scrapped records to put Diaper Island together. This fully realized result was worth the wait.

Diaper Island is less idiosyncratic than Soft Airplane in many ways. Was your aim to make a more straightforward rock record?
After [Soft Airplane], I made an electronic record, which was totally horrible from every angle; it was completely an embarrassment to music in general. And then a folk record came out after that. Well, not out, but came out of me, and it was stripped-down ukulele songs. "Shave My Pussy" was the one song I used from there on this record. Then a garage rock record was after that and the recording was really bad; I was trying to capture it really quickly and I was in a phase where I was pretty frustrated with technology, so I put no effort into making it sound like anything and it ended up sounding really bad. "Freedom for a Policeman" and "Blonde Hash" were recorded on that record, but sounded way too lo-fi to be acceptable, in my mind. [Diaper Island] came out of all those sessions, plus there were a bunch of rock songs that I re-recorded. They sounded the best, so it was easy to make a rock record. I was like, "Okay, the other ones didn't work and rock is feeling good to me right now, so I might as well make a rock record."
I wanted to ask first about the Your Tan Looks Supernatural EP. Were those songs written at the same time as the Diaper Island sessions?
No, those songs were written at the same time as Soft Airplane. Those songs were two years old, some of them.

Do you feel pressure to get better with every album, like you're competing with your past records?
I feel like I'm trying to erase my past. It's weird, everyone thinks I'm a songwriter; it's a hilarious joke to myself that people think I'm a songwriter, 'cause I got into music in the first place for music concrete and found sounds and bigger musical landscapes, rather than these compartmentalized, little snippets. That's what Infiniheart was: just a collection of ten years' worth of material that just happened to fit together. Out of that, people were like, "Let's hear another song record!" And I was like, "What?!" Soft Airplane was the first record where I was trying to write "songs" and this one is a continuation of that, where I was like, "Okay, here are some songs, again!" I don't know how long this will last; it's totally abstract to me to even imagine a song in my mind, let alone record it.

Are you embarrassed when you listen to your old albums?
Uhhh, yeah.

How recently? When you listen back to Soft Airplane, what do you think?
I think I'm probably the least embarrassed of Soft Airplane, just because I felt like Skelliconnection was a bit of a disaster and that I was really rushed when I was making it. I made a promise to myself that I wouldn't make the same mistakes. I put a lot more energy into the crafting of Soft Airplane.

How did working outside of your own studio, at Yoko Eno, influence Diaper Island?
It was nice to have everything set up all the time. That's maybe what made it sound like a rock record: the fact that everything was set up to sound the same.

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(Flemish Eye)

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