Chad VanGaalen: "Sara"

Diaper Island—Chad VanGaalen’s fourth studio record, not counting his work as Black Mold, and his first since getting producer’s credit for Women’s obliterative, insanely confrontational Public Strain just last year—is a distorted, at times messy affair. It’s also shockingly consistent in its approach, all tape-hiss and guitars that alternately slash and smear themselves under a murk of effects. Effectively a bold love letter to the music that made him want to make music in the first place, the album is also, surprisingly, the most life-affirming and obviously romantic thing in a back catalogue littered with death, more death, and more and more and more death. Heck, even album-closer “Shave My Pussy” is a veritable heart-warmer. Speed it up, CMG’s Aaron Newell says, and you basically have a ’50s doo-wop song…which is kind of really awesome.

But not awesome like “Sara” is awesome. The album’s first single and most direct statement is an absolute stunner. With just acoustic guitar and whistling (and towards the end, an entire chorus of Chads), we get something verging on the transcendent—the kind of bleakly yearning chord progression Chad’s built so many great songs on, but kicked up a gear. Yes, “Sara” is simply more yearning, more eye-scratchingly lovely, more insidious in its melodic about-turns than anything the guy’s done before. Not a rote “love” song; if anything it’s a straight-up declaration, a blazing tribute. And its positioning—smack in the middle of Diaper Island‘s blown-out and thrashing mini-meteors of sound—is another stroke of brilliance. “Sara” is an island of relative quiet on an album otherwise concerned with rawking out; the song hovers like a specter.

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