The most noteworthy thing about John Vanderslice’s new album is this: Romanian Names it’s the best record he’s made to date. The 12 songs represent a career-defining moment, a pitch-perfect collection written and recorded with the utmost care and attention.
Vanderslice is certainly not the first artist to make such a leap several albums into a career – think Guided by Voices on Bee Thousand, Spoon’s Kill the Moonlight or Of Montreal’s Sunlandic Twins. Vanderslice’s newest, his first for Dead Oceans, makes that step and separates itself from an already top-notch body of work.
The process of writing Romanian Names differed from that of prior Vanderslice albums. This time, he moved outside the normal (and by now maybe too comfortable) confines of his famed San Francisco recording studio, Tiny Telephone. He constructed a simple basement studio in his home and wrote and recorded the elemental demos for these songs alone with simply a guitar or piano to accompany his voice. The emphasis was placed on melody and structure, putting thoughts of instrumentation and studio wizardry on hold until there was a complete and stable foundation to build upon. The songs were given time to breathe, to be re-worked and reorganized, and sometimes enough time to be thrown out entirely. Benefiting from this organic and evolutionary process, Romanian Names coheres beautifully.And then there are the other songs on the album. Songs about losing a girlfriend’s rabbit, a detective tracking another detective in a murder investigation, a groupie infatuated with a pop star, and behavior-modifying pharmaceuticals. Superficially, there seems to be no connection between this crop of songs and the more politically aware ones. The boyfriend losing the rabbit and the wounded soldier seemingly have nothing in common, until the boyfriend of “Angela” uses the rabbit’s escape as an excuse to talk about getting the hell out of Burbank— “What do we have here anyway?/ The abandoned warehouse scene…/ Synthesized, bullshit art dreams”. The detective in “Continuation” is caught in the same feedback loop as the gun-show goer in “Exodus Damage”. And just as the journalist is looking to escape the noise and chaos of the war, the pop fan’s looking for an oasis from the noise and chaos of his life. The verses of “Peacocks in the Video Rain” are cluttered with everyday debris and disjointed thoughts, but they give way to a simple four-word chorus, four words that are implied by the speaker in “Trance Manual”— “I love you, too.”

Like Vanderslice’s last album, Pixel Revolt features a store’s worth of cool noise makers, used primarily by the singer and long-time collaborator Scott Solter. Meticulous arrangements abound, with the strings done by cellist Erik Friedlander, but everything is in it’s right place. To the credit of Vanderslice and Solter, the orchestral clown-car smorgasborgs to be had in “Trance Manual” and “Exodus Damage” sound just as unfussy as sparse tracks like “Dead Pacific Slate” and “Farewell Transmission”. Some might wish this gift for fastidious arrangements would carry over to the lyrics, which feature a bevy of look-it-up references and descriptions that might stymie attempts at easy listening. It doesn’t hurt to do a little research or, like, pay attention to lyrics worth a damn. (According to the liner notes, “the lyrics of Pixel Revolt have been edited, expanded, and otherwise improved upon by John Darnielle”, so now you know the rest of the story.)

Appropriately, the one song that falls flat on this album— “CRC 7173, Affectionately”— is as straight-forward as one could hope, both on the word and music tip. It’s also boring as hell (think: really bad Maroon 5), and ends the album on a sour note. Better, in my mind, to end with the solemn epiphany of “Dead Slate Pacific”— “the only thing standing between/ Me and that long rope over a carpenter’s beam/ Was you”— and its gorgeous instrumental coda, “The Golden Gate”. On an excellent album full of stories about running away and seeking safe haven, it would have been nice to end knowing someone found where they belong and, hopefully, made it through to the other side.