When amateur scientists want to refute intelligent design, they point to the poor flounder. A bottom-dwelling flatfish that swims on its side, the flounder’s appearance is excruciatingly asymmetrical because one eye is caught in an evolutionary walkabout. Ichthyologists say this grotesquery resulted from “cascading” or changing too many traits at once: a Hapsburgian quirk of puberty whereby its babyface slides off its adult head. Life’s messy? You have no idea!
Evolution – the underlying theme for the immersive, psyche-pop mini-album Hazy Days – can do control and chaos but not always at the same time. More reactionary than proactive, like evolution the album fends off changes in the environment while clinging tightly to instinct. The Anglo/Italian rock band Vanarin use the eight tracks to see where we are in our development, often finding that we’re not much farther along than our eventful two minutes would suggest. Sonically similar to OK Computer and also using technology as a lens, the theme constantly returns to our mental/emotional unpreparedness for environments that we perpetually reinvent.
Where Radiohead focused on detachment, Vanarin key on moments when our insides shift into overdrive. With bursts of open-gate distortion, “My Circle” threatens a betrayer, “Don’t be sittin’ in my circle / don’t be steppin’ in my circle”. “A Fly On The Wall” dives deeper into our guts: “You know they say you are what you eat?” and lays the elections of Donald Trump at all of our feet, “Orange-haired baboon speakin’ like a human / Throwin’ stones to break the bones.”
The tracks are brief and constructed like so much DNA. Mutations arise and disappear as they outlive their usefulness, while the bones march in a linear path. Along with Radiohead, Vanarin sound like they have studied TV On The Radio, Björk, Gorillaz, Madlib, Jim Noir, and Everything Everything, with telltale blues licks revealing their rock bonafides as the patchwork of samples and digital percussion demonstrates a willingness to chuck everything in the mixer. “What We Said” relies on increasingly rattled forms of vocal manipulation to showcase not just frustration and disorientation but an addiction to embellishing feelings of discomfort.
At its center, though, “What We Said” is about fundamental communication breakdowns and how free will keeps us from obtaining what we want. At the other end of the brain, however, “Memories” highlights the dopamine we get from nostalgia and how amnesia for the struggles condemns us to repeating mistakes: “I wonder where the time went / now I just want to go back there.” The woozy, bending synth chords refracting like light in a glass of water, an appropriate illustration of the mind’s gaps.
Hazy Days refrains from trying to say too much, and often returns to sentiments widely covered by others that are effective nonetheless. “Hey Listen” pines for the simplicity of childhood, “Hey, listen to the kids outside/they don’t say much but they know when to try to hide”. Life was easier when we knew less, before they wandered off our faces and into the screens.
