You take your eyes off this guy for a few minutes and he releases a couple of albums, a vinyl only EP made out of an asteroid and has toured your town half a dozen times without thinking to stop by to say hey. He’s a busy guy and has that uncanny ability to produce album of the year entries without fail.
Is he most known for an elaborate hoax involving microsoft, the most poignant song about the september 11th or producing a stupid amount of indie classics over the past decade or so?
My problem is I’ve never been able to get past the work surrounding his finest moment, Pixel Revolt. A flawless and beautiful album and when supporting Death Cab outshone them at their peak with what was at that point an already monumental catalog of work. This is nearly 10 years from that and if you think he hasn’t added to that rendering it an afterthought in his setlists, you crazy.
I’ve caught glimpses of his brilliance since then, maybe a couple of songs from Emerald City and Romanian Names but like I say keeping up has been difficult. JV’s lyricism is so intelligent and his music so intricate that you feel you need to devote time to it rather than dipping in and out and sometimes you’re not in the mood to have your soul searched and to feel things you had no idea you were thinking.
Dagger Beach is his latest album of original material, released last year through a kickstarter campaign and before that was White Wilderness a more orchestral affair with Magik*Magik. Neither of which I’ve heard but we all owe it to ourselves to be more familiar with his work.
Trance Manual
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Kookaburra
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Streetlights