CD Review

Chad VanGaalen’s Calgary bedroom must be the kind of place where even four walls and six inches of wool aren’t enough to stay warm. On Infiniheart, VanGaalen’s aching Neil Young falsetto swims in its own misery, dragging a tangled mess of digitized beats, organic indie-folk and slacker rock down into his murky dreams, where apocalyptic catch-22s, vein machines, brain motors and a somehow endearing blood fetish mingle in the black depths and freeze to death under a pile of warm blankets.

The oceanic subconscious of “After the Afterlife” nods through blind-date conversation, dropping in and out of cool, green seaweed dreams while the abstract trumpet and guitar lullaby of “1000 Pound Eyelids” bubbles up into a crumpled heap of metal in a ditch, only to fall asleep again in “Traffic” on the way to the grocery store.

Dreaming becomes even more dangerous on “Kill Me in My Sleep,” where post-modern electronic beats and a soothing falsetto downshift into eerie, acoustic paranoia as VanGaalen chokes into his pillow: “You’ll slit my throat and drain my blood.” Jangly Sebadoh darkness drips from a hole in the wall on “Red Blood,” while post-apocalyptic underground societies enslaved by a menacing “Blood Machine” beg for rescue in VanGaalen’s epic dying visions.

Assembled from at least six years of home recordings, Infiniheart is expansive, intricate and challenging. Heavy bass rattles chattering ciruits as windchime guitars dance in the wind on “J.C.’s Head on the Cross”; indie-folk and punky-pop get hooked up to a machine on “Clinically Dead.” Flittering woodwind fairies tromp through muddy red clay in leather boots and pixiedust to the beat of “Sunshine Snare Hits.” Small guitar showers erupt into a northwestern downpour of gloom rock on “Echo Train.”

All this variety is initially tough to swallow, but considering the thousands of hours of material from which it was culled, its cohesion is nothing short of miraculous. VanGaalen has risen from street corners, selling homemade discs for pocket change, to SubPop, and he’s recorded two more albums since Infiniheart’s independent release. As prolific as they come, Chad VanGaalen has made an art of putting dreams on record, and there’s plenty more where these came from.