With five albums now under his belt, John Vanderslice is beginning to look like a cult figure. He's never received widespread critical acclaim or seen overwhelming commercial success, but he always sticks around and travels in credible circles by offering rich rewards to anyone who takes the time to fully explore one of his albums. Vanderslice doesn't strike the very marrow of human isolation, he's not making an album about every state in the union, and he never steps forward with a life-affirming worldview; instead, he sets literature to song and aims for emotional response and involvement.
A good portion of Pixel Revolt deals with people sorting out personal insecurities against a sociopolitical backdrop. The issues at hand (the war with Iraq, prescription drug abuse, scene politics) are only important insofar as they bear down upon the characters' fragile psyches. Vanderslice peers into our behavior as a nation to ponder the ways in which it complicates the struggles that exist apart from it, and he asks us to sympathize with him and his characters. His power lies not so much in his masterful telling or psychological probing as in his ability to force us to identify.
Vanderslice's stories differ from those on earlier albums largely in setting, but Pixel Revolt's musical elements have taken an astonishing leap from their predecessors. For the first time in his solo career, Vanderslice has written undeniable pop songs that stand apart from the accompanying narratives. I listened to and loved "Trance Manual" five times before I realized that it was about a man visiting a prostitute, and though it grew into a truly great song once I delved into the narrator's objectification, it already ranked as a damn good song, dripping with swooning melody and wisps of analogue synth.
The songs' ability to satisfy as both casual and intense listening experiences lies in Vanderslice's ability to step back and allow the unexpected to happen. His stories never reach definitive conclusions -- they often end at a thought's punctuation rather than an event's completion, and the characters are stretched so tightly over the emotional rack that they never appear committed to any one attitude or course of action -- so they never require that the music do the same. Pixel Revolt's aesthetic doesn't call for show-stopping build-ups or vibrant crescendos, leaving the music free from the burden of providing dramatic propulsion. Because Vanderslice's stories exist as passages of inner dialogue, the only demand upon his music is that it, too, speak steadily and clearly. As a result, his minimal guitar arrangements and pop fetishist keyboards exist as ends unto themselves; they needn't act in symbiosis with the music, so they don't. Without the pressure of the compulsion to reflect the subject matter through sound, the music and lyrics play off one another in puzzling, bittersweet ways that leave ample room for interpretation. The unsure rebel's cry of "Dance, dance revolution" in "Exodus Damage", for instance, comes swathed in atmospheric swirl that doesn't attempt to "mean" anything. It's a haunting cry against a gorgeous backdrop that never merges into a unified statement; if anything, this interplay mirrors the narrator's confusion in the rest of the song, but that's as close of a reading as it asks of the listener. Otherwise, "Exodus Damage", like the rest of Pixel Revolt, justifies Vanderslice's reliance on emotional response by allowing you to let it penetrate your heart at your own discretion. You'll have to let it seep in, of course, if it's ever to become significant to you, but this time Vanderslice also provides plenty of surface-level pleasures as well.
