Skelliconnection

Chad VanGaalen is very prolific. Skelliconnection was culled from hundreds of songs Chad has recorded over the last year or so, while holed up in his bare bones basement home studio. Using handmade instruments alongside those available to mere mortals, he’s created an even more diverse assemblage of music than for his last album and debut, Infiniheart. Chad resides in Calgary, Alberta, which is in Canada. He’s an amazingly talented illustrator and animator. There’s a chance you might have seen the videos he made for his own “Clinically Dead” and Love as Laughter’s “Dirty Lives.” They were featured on MTV2’s Subterranean video show, which Chad also hosted. He’s played with Built to Spill, Wolf Parade, The Pixies, and Stars, to name a few. Mostly, Chad likes to stay home and make songs and drawings. Chad’s new record, on the other hand, resides somewhere a little more difficult to pin down. It’s a restless, living thing, roaming between simple yet beautiful ballads, aggressively dissonant post-punk, and jazz-inflected synth-pop explorations, at times whimsical, and at others heartrending.

Sub Pop performer issues his second album, another impressive document of his intuitive and inventive songwriting.

Chad VanGaalen's first widely available disc, Infiniheart, was so shrouded in whispers and mist that it's a wonder the sounds ever escaped his Canadian bedroom. Compiled from hundreds of self-produced home recordings, the disc was one of last year's best—it quietly announced an incredibly subtle songwriter to the…

Recorded nearly single-handedly in his basement in Calgary (there are some guest drummers to keep the modifier in place), Chad VanGaalen -- who even invented some of the instruments he played -- had over 100 songs to choose from when deciding the track listing for his sophomore album, Skelliconnection.

There’s not much to any given song on the album to distinguish it from its obvious sub-genre counterparts.