Chad VanGaalen's Weird Country

In 2008, I went through a phase in which I grew completely bored of music. The one exception was Chad VanGaalen, whose brilliant album Soft Airplane had enough catchy melodies and inventively genre-busting arrangements to cut through my ennui. I ended up subsisting on that album for several weeks until the phase passed.

His latest self-produced LP, Shrink Dust, came out this week, and it features more of the Calgary songwriter’s characteristically inventive arrangements. He describes it as a "country record" in his press materials, but his approach is, as always, decidedly non-traditional.

This much becomes clear in the first song, "Cut Off My Hands," a quietly gorgeous acoustic ditty with grotesque lyrics about bloody dismemberment and "a giant stinking mouth that's been shooting out spit." At around the one-minute mark the arrangement is fleshed out with atonal overdubs that bear no apparent rhythmic or melodic relation to the rest of the song.

The very next track, "Where Are You?", is a static-soaked psych freakout in which VanGaalen wails over frightening swaths of billowing feedback and distorted drum beats. After that, "Frozen Paradise" once again mixes melodic beauty with instrumental quirkiness, fleshed out with synthesized squelches and jumbled hip-hop rhythms.

Not all of the collection is quite as crazy as these opening cuts: "Lila" sports a soaring chorus that's doused in honey-dipped harmonies, and the gospel-flavoured folk number "Weighed Sin" is flecked with rustic pedal steel and harmonica.

But even these more straightforward tunes highlight the record's diversity: Shrink Dust is the kind of album where the lullaby-like "Evil" can sit comfortably alongside the pummeling blues rock squall of "Leaning on Bells."

Some of these songs will serve as the soundtrack to VanGaalen's very own animated sci-fi film, Translated Log of Inhabitants, which is due out later this year. Knowing him -- and his bizarre animations -- the movie is bound to be fucking insane.