by Devin Birse (@devvvvi.b)
Grief is a monolith. A grand shadow over life. An enveloping swarm that consumes and catastrophises. While noise rock is a genre often built around ugly sounds and ugly thoughts, there's nearly always a sense of play involved. A layer of smarmy edge or separation, some surrealness, and sometimes a thin barrier between the instruments on stage and the sounds coming out of the speakers. But on Vangas’ third album, all facades have fallen. The exquisite garage-punk nihilism of their previous releases has faded away, consumed by a bleak sonic abyss of misery. With a title like You Left Us In the Spring and a vocal delivery where the screams turn into tears into retching, it's hard not to be affected, to not be consumed by its bleakness. But in that bleakness, Vangas have crafted something incredible. A distinct horizon-scraping piece of noise rock, one which articulates its grief through visceral experimentation without ever sacrificing its core emotions. At times, it feels impenetrable, so overwhelming in texture and misery, but taken as a whole, it carries an undeniable beauty.
What's immediately apparent about You Left Us In the Spring is its density. Vangas have taken the tools of late-era Swans, the near-orchestral complexities and brilliant approach to texture, and applied them to the band’s early no-wave brutality. The resulting combination is a swirling vortex of pain. The album moves with a near schizophrenic scramble, rattling drums encircling the listener around clockwork guitars that cut and tear through one another, finding new notes of distortion in their misery. Thumping bass drives these moments further, dragging the band out of the gutter and forcing them to stumble home weeping. The main new addition is horns, grand screeching, skronking, and weeping slabs of free jazz whose vicious moans are matched only by lead singer Christian Touchet‘s screeches. Opener ‘In A Dark Wood’ lays bare the foundations, the dark glow of its opening ambience giving way to an endless morotik drum march, as collapsing guitars and creeping vocals resemble a cross between Neubauten’s abandoned factory terror and the whirring dissonance of This Heat’s horizontal hold. The track's most masterful moment is its ending, the slow funereal march of the saxophones as Touchet shrieks “I just want to feel how he felt/black belt around my neck.” While Vangas have always played with dissonant masochistic imagery, here there is no act of play. It's real and it's blistering.
Across the tracks that follow, grief is rendered visceral and oblique. “Control” from their debut album Facial Tissue has been re-recorded into a shattering slab of claustrophobic tweaking guitars gradually coalescing into moments of nightmarish totalism. The more reserved “The Hole Where You Slept” is a cryptic slab of no-wave noodling, slowly ambling around in a drunken shuffle as Touchet mumbles and whispers like a man locked in a backwoods church basement delivering his final confession. His vocal tone carries the drawls and howls of noiseniks past, but with a core vulnerability that resembles the likes of Jamie Stewart and Scott Walker. Like them, Christian knows the power of getting close to the mic, whispering deep into the listener. The way he marries anguish with a near seduction bears comparison to Eugene S. Robinson of Oxbow or PJ Harvey. Like them, Touchet renders the darkness as seductive, bizarrely appealing in doing so nails the twisted joy of the bad thoughts in life. The way they creep into us and offer us comfort.
At their core, Vangas remain a band of intense and incredible musical chemistry. Lead single “Slow Strum” appears at the album's mid-way point, becoming a sort of axis around which the listener orients themself. Beginning as a screeching noise rock march with Touchet chanting “I can’t, I can’t,” it undergoes a near-miraculous transformation halfway through. Lifting and gliding sax work sends the track soaring as interlocking guitars flutter like a grim angel's wings cast out across some ruined city, the core rhythms lock until the drums and bass clash, tearing the angel down into the gutter.
It’s deep in that gutter where most of You Left Us In the Spring resides. “I Speak Softly” moves with a bizarre underground groove like a sludgified Contortions track. Its individual elements ricochet off each other into a sonic junkyard before snapping together into a riotous slab of shrieking post-hardcore excess. Perhaps the album's best and grimmest track is “The Handstand,” whose initial screeches give way to a slow build, as Touchet renders his body and face grotesque through visceral lyricism. As it climaxes, “I Speak Softly” collapses into rising shrieks and sax squalls like the final retching of vomit. The final gags of a breakdown as light cymbal taps build tension until the whole thing collapses into a slow post-rock stumble. The last moans of the saxophone guide the listener home.
It's telling that “All Those Things That Made Us” ends the album without vocals. The slow march twinkling guitars and saxophone sludge give way to a gentle, jazzy ambiance as the drums continue to tear on. It doesn’t offer the listener a conclusion so much as a moment to linger on. Grief and death don’t ever really leave; they're just things we learn to live with. While noise rock can often capture our worst impulses, Vangas have achieved something more with this album, contorting and reforming genre elements with the keen precision and deconstructive work ethic of early post-punk and industrial experimentalists to create their genuine opus. You Left Us In the Spring is a raw and captivating portrait of the mind wracked by grief. It's real and it's visceral. Sometimes haunting, other times head-bangingly catchy, but always beautiful in its technical brilliance and sincerity.