Chad VanGaalen – World’s Most Stressed Out Gardener
Sub Pop Records/Flemish Eye – 19 March 2021
Chad VanGaalen has a way of looking at the world from a viewpoint slightly more fractured than most folks, and on World’s Most Stressed Out Gardener nothing is ever really what you’d expect. That’s the joy of the skewed planet on which he lives. From his Yoko Eno studio in Calgary, VanGaalen wields his warped vision of reality (or is it our vision that’s warped?), delivering music that sometimes seems like a distant cousin of Robyn Hitchcock’s Soft Boys combined with Kraftwerk. Needless to say, this is a weird trip.
Taking joy in wrong turns and mucking things up, World’s Most Stressed Out Gardener begins with Vangaalen’s voice and a guitar on “Spider Milk” before almost immediately becoming unhinged as he sings, ““We lived on the spider’s milk all summer/ With the eventual return of the mascot’s head/ We all climbed aboard and lived inside of it”. Normalcy is clearly over-rated. The wobbly guitar of the opening is replaced by a prog/punk blend of electric guitars and saxes before veering back to the opening.
The album has its musical roots in “Flute Peace,” a 46-second remnant of the original concept for a minimalist flute adventure. Left turns appear again and again, largely because of the way he creates. “Don’t overthink it. I’m always trying to get outside of the song—but then I realize I love the song” VanGaalen relates. Yet the tangents are also what makes the album so intriguing. You have to hang on and just let the roller coaster go, it’s not under your control.
“Where’s It All Going” sounds like it could be from the Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young back catalog until you start to examine the lyrics, “We would like to believe that the song we’re singing/ but the words feel like they’ve got no meaning.” And then of course, the song builds to something clearly less folky before segueing into “Earth from a Distance,” a lovely synth display with wordless vocals that mesmerizes even while random noises threaten to overtake the beauty.
Weird and wonderful, VanGaalen uses everything he can find to create music, including the copper pipes he removed during a basement renovation. They provide another dimension to the child-like “Samurai Sword.” He notes, “I had just ripped a bunch of old leaking copper pipe out of my basement in a reno job that I jumped into willy nilly. Realizing how magical the pipes sounded, I put them on some dirty styrofoam and banged out the janky beat that introduces the song! Garbage is life.” Not surprisingly it fits right into the general scheme of things on an album simply brimming with ideas. Lyrically it’s full of whimsy, “Has anybody seen a samurai sword?/ I think I left it leaning on the outhouse door/ It has a blade that has been tempered by the blood of the Gods/ And a tiny little sticker of a dog.”
We live in strange times, in an even stranger world. And the music Chad VanGaalen creates on World’s Most Stressed Out Gardener is a reflection of that. That he is able to capture all the joy and weirdness makes the album that much better.
Photo credit: Sebastian Buzzalino