Shrink Dust
Chad VanGaalen’s blood flows by unrestrained creative impulses. He has never worked in a commercial recording studio. By his hands alone, one line, sound, shape or word leads organically to the next. In 2011, he wanted to score a science fiction film, so he started making one. The first episode of his animated feature, Translated Log of Inhabitants, should be released this year, with a fully illustrated D&D-esque compendium of 150 associated characters. Shrink Dust, his fifth full-length album under his own name, is partially a score to this film, but it’s also—in Chad’s view—a country record. Always a fan of esoteric instruments, Chad recently acquired an aluminum pedal steel guitar, and began trying to figure out how to play it: “It took me a month to set it up, and a year to be comfortable recording myself playing this thing.” His experiments with this instrument unify the album, along with themes of death, transformation, fear, benign evil, and the eccentricity of love. A newfound affection for The Flying Burrito Brothers, and the sci-fi mysticism of the 1980s graphic novel The Incal by Alejandro Jodorowsky and Moebius, were also significant in recent years. Somehow, with all of its disparate influences and components, Shrink Dust might be one of the most accessible moments in CVG’s creative life, simply because it is more apparent than ever how much fun he is having blurring the lines between the vivid worlds of his creation, and the world his audience inhabits. For those who are open to it, Chad’s adventures in music and art illuminate a path that is more colorful, playful, and sustainable than those commonly available to us. A path that is, most importantly, always changeable. You can see and hear his alternate reality through the artifacts he offers up. But as it turns out, the only true access point into Chad VanGaalen’s expanding universe is one’s own will to create. Find Chad: He’s a monster. - Bryan Webb
If everything Chad VanGaalen touches seems to have a repellant, piss-pungent weirdness about it, that's kind of a ruse—his records of jangly junkyard-pop are warm, inviting, and surprisingly easy to love. His latest, Shrink Dust, is possibly his best, and certainly his most confident; it's the closest we've come yet to getting inside his head.
Shrink Dust offers a minimal approach from an artist known for being restless. It's an album you can cozy up with a little easier.
Canadian singer/songwriter and visual artist Chad VanGaalen has been exploring off-beat, creative eccentricities and maneuvering the lo-fi D.I.Y. landscape since his 2004 debut Infiniheart.
“Cut off both my hands and threw them in the sand,” sings Chad VanGaalen cheerfully, adding: “Watched them swim away from me like a pair of bloody crabs.” You’re gonna struggle to find a better opening couplet – so dark, so repulsive, so intriguing. It revels in his ability to wrap this decidedly unusual fare in soft, warm sheets of pathos, rendering even his more grotesque lines somewhat beautiful. A nifty trick.
At this stage in the game, we sort of know what to expect when Calgary homebody Chad VanGaalen puts out a new album.
Album review: Chad VanGaalen - 'Shrink Dust'. The Canadian has delivered an album with ambition to be applauded…
Review of Chad VanGaalen's Shrink Dust, the new album comes out on April 29th via Sub Pop/Flemish Eye records. The first single from the LP is "Monster"