John Vanderslice Romanian Names

For better or worse, John Vanderslice – talented songwriter that he is – lives or dies depending on his albums’ production, and that adds a whole other level of risk to any stylistic changes. Now seven albums deep into his career and largely unknown outside of a relatively small hipster circle, Vanderslice is making major changes in his music – some good, some off-putting – and on Romanian Names he seems to grasp for a new style and perhaps a new audience. Albums like Emerald City and Pixel Revolt were full of ambitious writing on millennial anxiety. And in a display of his most badass side, Pale Horse from Cellar Door included the lines, “Let the tyrants pour around, with apocalyptic sound, on the charge of iron wheels and the crash of horses’ heels,” set to a background of instrumentation that seemed determined to rip itself apart. It was mere anarchy, to borrow a Yeatsian phrase. Fans of these albums may hear Names and naturally react with, “What the hell happened to JV’s spine?” But this disc proves that the man still has fresh ideas, even if some of them alienate his followers.

Independent from the lyrics, the songs sound creepier than anyone would have predicted. Gone is the over-driven acoustic guitar that propelled tunes like White Dove. Instead, we have the ethereal synthesizers of Too Much Time – one of the album’s potential hits. His singing on this track displays his ear for the unexpected note and his Bob Pollard-like gift for melody, but unlike the vocals of an artist like – let’s say – Mirah, which seem to grow organically out of lush arrangements, JV’s voice sounds detached from the artificial-sounding orchestration, as if to convey an out-of-body experience.

To his credit, artificiality has always been part of Vanderslice’s shtick. His reference to a lost lover’s “pixilated face” on Fetal Horses connects the track to the title of an earlier album, but more importantly, it represents the distorted thinking of the song’s obsessive narrator. There’s nothing like a good stalker song.

This is his most vulnerable material to date – so much so that it reads less like an end-of-the-world revelation and more like a surrealist’s travel blog. Though there’s no clear story arc, he gives enough detail so that listeners can construct their own ideas of what’s happening. His lover dumps him with “a letter from Syria.” He travels the world in search of her, and makes plenty of poor decisions along the way (“The longer I’m out here, the more I forget who I was. The people I’ve hooked up, they only care about what I’ve become”). He wakes up on some foreign shore, singing “the journey won’t last forever.” Later, the letter from Syria comes back: “So, I’ve lost a year on that shaky pier. To find an answer, I’ve searched every sentence, and ended, deeper still, in hard times.”

On that note, I could spend a year pouring over the lyric sheet to the beautifully spare title track and still be unsure of what’s going on. Vanderslice strums as if playing for a Nebraska-esque demo and tells the narrative of a proto-Nadia Comaneci taken away from home at the age of three. When the narrator meets the girl “in the tunnel of the stadium,” he pleads, “Don’t return to that satellite tomb.” I have to hand it to him for using vague symbolism. What could a “satellite tomb” be except maybe a bit of nonsense to evoke the ideas of distance and death? This is the sort of metaphorical mash-up that makes JV a fascinating wordsmith.

In general, he sounds softer on this record (the tones sometimes recall Belle and Sebastian), and it doesn’t necessarily suit him all the time. Even if the new direction disappoints some old fans, though, it’s hard to escape the fact that Vanderslice is an original songwriter with a vision for his material, even if that vision isn’t clear. Of course, maybe he’s just screwing with us.