INDIE ROCK
JOHN VANDERSLICE
EMERALD CITY
***
Singer-songwriter John Vanderslice has long mined the best of pop music to create his spacey indie rock, and his latest album is full of grand, orchestral moments (especially on “Kookaburra” and “The Minaret”) that will make your head spin like Love by The Beatles.
Vanderslice has written many songs about alienation, isolation and displacement in the past—telling wild stories of characters based on people he’s encountered as well as his vivid imagination—and if he sounds a bit more dour than usual, it’s because he’s dealing with his own personal snafu.
He wrote this album after his French girlfriend’s visa application was denied, and you can hear his frustration on many of these new urgent, ominous songs. The closer, “Central Booking,” is directly about Vanderslice and his girlfriend’s sad story, and he sounds as defeated as he ever has. It’s a reminder that the world can be a cold, cold place, and sometimes all you can do is write and sing and scream and hope.