Minnesotan Mongooses
- Posted by mariteaux on November 12th, 2020 filed in Music
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In September, I bought a tape. It wasn’t a particularly expensive tape–$7 for the tape itself and $3 to ship it. It’s a tape dcb and I have been wondering about for a long time, with a real mystery surrounding one of its tracks–and given that it’s limited-edition with who knows how many copies left over at Spirit Goth, I decided not to chance waiting.
It’s a little band called Vansire, actually from dcb’s neck of the woods in Minnesota. They’re ostensibly of the bedroom pop ilk, but I absolutely despise that term, so I’m just gonna go with the tried and true. They’re on the stiller, more nostalgic end of dream pop, more vaporwave than Slowdive, but with actual songs to sing. Towards the end of the 2010s, as I said, Spirit Goth issued a limited-edition cassette of what I assume are the duo’s favorite tracks from their two albums, plus The Rolling, Driftless North EP and a few smaller singles to round out the decade.
Now, to be clear, I have no real experience with Vansire outside of that EP and the two singles at the end of the B-side. It’s honestly why I was so interested in trying this tape out, to see how it fares as a primer for their body of work and to see what grabbed me after having given it my trademark two listens. I also wanted to dig into a question dcb and I have had for some time about the “demo” part of the version of “Metamodernity” on here–the YouTube stream just uses the finished version, so I wanted to see if the version on the tape proper was actually any different.
This thing’s been sitting around on my desk long enough, really, and NoFEMBR must feast on finished projects. So, in the least Rediscovering way I can possibly muster, here’s a look at Vansire’s The Latter Teens.
As far as the packaging and the tape itself go, they feel…about $7 worth of good, I’d say. The J-card is literally a two-sided piece of paper, no real booklet or inserts like on some of my older, nicer tapes, no real reading material to go with your album, and everything’s oddly squeaky–including the tape itself! Seriously, I got about halfway through the first side before a strange noise started to hang under the music, and while I thought at first it was a sound issue with the tape, it turns out, it was actually with the shell. Mine also rattles, and the labeling on the tape itself is pretty weak and basic too.
Gripes about the tape aside (and I guess for being so cheap, it’s fair enough), and as a final notice before I get into the songs and sound proper, another issue I thought I was having was the rather absurd lo-finess of the first song, as if this thing was a cooked dub-of-a-dub rather than a first gen pre-recorded tape. A quick check of the Spotify version proved that, no, that’s just how the song sounded. (I did find out in my scramble that the incredibly cheap, modern, low-end tape deck built into my stereo has a wow-and-flutter measurement in the range of “not good”, though, so that’s nice.)
“Bridges for the Young” (from 2016’s Reflections and Reveries, natch) leads the tape off in the most pleasant murk I can imagine, only a cool, rolling bassline and a few trailing vocals managing to cut through the swirl that even grains out the drums at times. It’s not bad at all, managing to capture a pretty strong wistfulness in its clouds of cooked cassette smoke and looming synth leads.
Things only get better with “Pontchartrain”, not only the catchiest of all the songs on the A-side, but also the first one that shows off Vansire’s secret weapon–Josh Augustin’s lyrical style. It’s not that the group are bad sonically, hardly–lyrics are nothing without a good song behind them, and if anything, they’re a cut above the moody shlock that passes for dream pop thanks to their backgrounds as music students. What I think really sets them apart, though, is their personality infused into the tracks, the kind that only comes from studying Schoenberg by day and dealing with the shitty cold by night.
“Water Boils” demonstrates this perfectly. The mixture of the reverb-drenched guitar string noise simulating the drips of thawing water and the strong descriptions of resigning yourself to endless harsh winters–chilled earth, mugs of tea, growing coat-to-coat–mix so vividly, so perfectly. That “Pontchartrain” deals in locations–the Marigny and Bywater of New Orleans, not to mention the titular Louisiana lake–give an otherwise catchy, simple little song a bit more depth and a bit more reality than what your average, more-in-love-with-love-itself-than-anyone-in-particular dream popper tends to deal with.
The duo really grows into it by the time you get to the Driftless tracks. Of course, there were only five to begin with, but they pick the best of the lot. “Eleven Weeks” drifts enough to satisfy the dream poppers and catches your ear enough if you actually want a song to chew on, and “Four Portraits” is…well, a pretty distinctive portrait of trying to balance your heady musical ambitions of movements and tone rows and poppy, “retrograde” songwriting that any old idiot could do. It sounds pretentious, but man, do they pull it off. I especially like the key changes towards the end, coordinated to fit the shifting mood of the protagonist.
Angel Youth‘s tracks actually start towards the end of the A-side, but they take up the bulk of the B-side. This is where the tape starts to get spotty, unfortunately, as Angel Youth was defined by a clearinghouse of collaborations and guest appearances, none of which really make the impression that Vansire themselves do. I suppose this is better than the reverse, but only so much. Worse yet, while the Reflections and Driftless tracks were kinda technically of the bedroom pop mold, but more than made up for it with their charm and songwriting–nothing of the sort here.
“Halcyon Age” starts things off well enough, typical Vansire fare with a vocal melody that seems to jump around less typically. It’s intelligent and wordy, perhaps almost too so–but it certainly is a spectacle to behold that our lads managed to fit references to Daniel Johnston (who was the song’s former namesake) and Karlheinz Stockhausen in the same song and somehow, weirdly, make it work.
The collaborations begin proper with FLOOR CRY’s contribution (naturally vocally) to “Nice to See You”, and it’s probably (I guess) the one that goes over the best here. Ignoring the lyrical front for a moment (and believe me, the transition is jarring), it’s pleasant enough musically, but pleasant isn’t memorable–and yeah, I forgot how this one went five minutes after hearing it. Normally, I’m a sucker for male-female duets, but FLOOR CRY’s vocals are about as forgettable as her name, and Josh isn’t much better here. Going back to the lyrical front, there’s such a clear chasm in ability here that it sounds more like Vansire’s being brought down to FLOOR CRY’s level rather than them being natural, effective collaborators.
Listen, I’m not someone who needs every song to be a lyrical masterpiece, I really don’t, but we are dealing with one of the most wishy-washy, pillowy, empty genres in all of rock music here. Something needs to provide the flavor. Again, going back to the A-side, “Water Boils” works because the mood the lyrics set are matched perfectly by the arrangement. It’s about something. This is dream pop done well. Unfortunately, when the guest vocalist drops pearls like “Did you know you’re really something?”, Vansire drop right off the Edge of Well into the Chasm of Competence, providing a fine, but utterly nondescript, backing for a SoundCloud warbler to say nothing at all over top.
“Star Catcher” directly after is just fucking insulting. I admit I am not the planet’s biggest rap fan (in fact, I’m pretty sure I’d just keep it to myself even if I did listen to more of it), but I’ve heard enough of it to know what a decent flow sounds like–and this isn’t it. The way this Chester Watson goofball drags out the “often” and “crosses” with all the grace of tripping over a curb, the disconnected and clearly insecure affect of his voice (mic presence? What the fuck’s that?), and the faux-spiritual bent of the lyrics–lordy, I sure hope this isn’t representative of the rest of his work. Again, it makes Josh’s lyrics fall back to babble to match Chester’s–which is about the greatest sin of the song.
But believe me, the other collab track on here, “Set Piece”, featuring FLOOR CRY’s equally nondescript squeaky SoundCloud brethren Sophie Meiers and Chester Watson’s equally flowless, emotionless rapper brethren Ivy Sole, is easily the worst of the lot. I could use a little more pump in the instrumental, but at the very least, the bass is cool and things start out alright. Really, it’s the Ivy Sole verse that irritates me; a flat singer can still be aesthetically pleasing, but a flat rapper pleases no one. She just has no presence to speak of, and neither her voice nor delivery command any particular attention. On top of that, her mic sounds like utter garbage, as if someone fucking scooped everything above 4KHz, and the instrumental sits on top of her as a result.
As much as I really don’t want to harp on lyrics more, I just want to show you these first couple lines because they are very special:
I thought that home was where you are until that home is where I left
I found a home inside myself since no home for me was left
I slept with poems in my hands for seven days
Slept alone and wept by twilight saw a throne, a silent phone in heaven’s name
Cause home can change and it does
Coining names for new love
Joining strange depictions tinted with that rose from my bud
Cause blood is thick but smoke be thick as hell
I’m sorry–what the fuck are you talking about?
And yet, right when it looks bleakest, with even Vansire’s originals flagging into mid-tempo goo–that’s when they get ya. As much as it proves Vansire should seriously not flirt with their political side, it’s the title track that brings blood back to my face. The rhythm section finally registers that bit of pulse and drive that makes all the difference, and the vocals, which have quietly and suddenly gotten very prominent since the Halcyon Age, actually carry a pretty pleasant and memorable vocal melody. “How I Miss You” and “Metamodernity”, Vansire’s sole 2019 output, round out the tape in even better form than “Angel Youth”. They finally manage to break out the lethargic mire with a pair of genuinely fantastic bass grooves and the clearest production of anything you’ll find here.
It’s the kind of variety you really wish you had four or five tracks ago, the kind that perfectly merge Vansire’s strange personality and strong, confident songwriting. And that’s The Latter Teens, really. This one’s best decided by your tolerance for weak features and the kind of navelgazing only middle class suburban kids with good internet connections can bring you. The highs are easily some of my favorite moments in dream pop and show that, if nothing else, Vansire really do have something there to take notice of.
Maybe it says something that my favorite tracks were “Pontchartrain” and “Metamodernity”, the most upbeat and catchy of them all. A band with dorky charm like Vansire needs to be matched with good songs that go places, and short of either, they might as well be producing lo-fi hip-hop to study/relax to. They do finally have another EP out, but given that FLOOR CRY makes another appearance on it, I’m a bit concerned.
Oh, and since I mentioned that “Metamodernity” demo, how’d that mystery pan out? Well, there is a difference…a subtle one, but it is there. I unfortunately don’t have a good way to transfer this tape at the moment, but there’s fewer layers and no lyrics on the bridge, that “it’s been hard to tell” couple of lines. Bit of a stretch to call it a “demo”, given that that’s literally the only change I could tell (maybe there’s more and I just need to listen closer, who knows), but at least mildly interesting.
I leave you with the band’s legendary dance moves. I think we all need them.
