In Stores Now: Romanian Names by John Vanderslice

Defaced photo of unknown boy
(from the Defaced Photos collection on Flickr)

San Francisco-based songwriter John Vanderslice has a new album out, and it's getting some mediocre reviews because his music has become "consistent" but no longer "exciting". It's true that Vanderslice has a sound that is pretty identifiable, but I think that his new record, Romanian Names, is a departure from his recent work, and a welcome one. Romanian Names is a glass menagerie - twelve delicate miniatures that each have their story to tell. There is something shining and crystalline about this set of songs, and I think it's one of the best albums Vanderslice has made.

Romanian Names is a definite departure from his last two albums, Pixel Revolt and Emerald City. Vanderslice had a pretty serious reaction to 9/11 and the Iraq War, and the two albums he put out during this period were a direct response, rife with politics and paranoia. These political songs ballooned into searing five-minute epics on Emerald City, which I didn't think played to Vanderslice's strengths. It was the first of his albums that I elected not to buy. Romanian Names is an audible sigh of relief - Vanderslice is in a better place now, and the songs benefit from it. The themes of this record are betrayal and displacement, but they are vignettes rather than personal journal entries. There is still a distinct sense of tension in the album, from the off-kilter tremelo of "Fetal Horses" to the sudden saxophone blares of "Forest Knolls" and the creepy atmospherics of "Summer Stock", but the mood is much less oppressive. Vanderslice is becoming a master of building soundscapes, and the wide open places of Romanian Names are a welcome change of scenery.

John Vanderslice has always had a troubled relationship with lyrics - his early albums borrowed extensively from famous poems or other contemporary lyricists (like the Mountain Goats' John Darnielle.) And every album had a few lines that were pretty cringe-worthy, my favorite being the following line from Cellar Door's "Heated Pool and Bar": "I've got a flak jacket on my soul with me tonight." On this album, Vanderslice declines to include lyrics in the liners for the first time, but the lyrics are a significant improvement over previous work. The song "Oblivion" has the unfortunate opening couplet "I took a blow to the head/mechanical pencil filled with lead," but most of the songs are interesting little stories told well.

My favorite song on Romanian Names is the album's brief title track, and it is a very spare arrangement of voice and guitar, not representative of the album's layered sound. But there is something very poignant about the way Vanderslice sees the young European gymnast in this song - the plaintive chorus of "still wide-eyed you," gets me every time.

"Romanian Names" by John Vanderslice