![]() ![]() “Everybody’s crying in the hallway,” Vu moans. The closest she comes to addressing it head-on is “Everybody’s Birthday,” a hazy song from the Lana and Lorde school of generational malaise. “Oh honey, I promise I’m the world’s worst lover,” Vu wails on “World’s Worst,” before murmuring, “I wonder if I get any younger than this.” It’s a winking, ironic articulation of the early-adult pain that she spends most of the record circling and dressing up in metaphor. “Here are my bruises, all my dents and my fuses,” she sings on the title track, before walking back any suggestion of vulnerability: “But I don’t really care now.”Ĭritics have compared Vu to Lana Del Rey practically since the start of her career, and there are snippets of Public Storage that recall the dark glamour and seeping melodrama of Born to Die. Instead she keeps a calculated distance, opting for intricacy over intimacy. The record doesn’t convey that personal tie, though, and while Vu makes many pretty statements about God and good and evil, she offers little about herself. Vu named the album after the massive self-storage building she lived beside when she started writing it, a structure that reminded her of the storage units she used while moving around a lot as a kid. At times, the sound is striking-the lush strings on “Maker,” the spatter of keys in “Anything Striking,” the weird wriggles of synths that creep into her choruses. Vu co-produced the album, which oscillates between bright coils of pop (“Keeper,” “Aubade”) and blasts of drums and guitar. “I live in a hole in the wall/You live in a hole in my head,” she sighs on “My House.” “They’ll blow smoke straight through your face,” she lilts on “Heaven, “And you turn to dust/And you fly away.” Where Vu’s previous releases were vivid and tactile, Public Storage numbs out. Vu sings about heaven burning, about pleading with the sun, about dreaming in gold. These are opaque songs about armageddon, gesturing at morose feelings and crammed with abstract statements. It’s a lyricism crystalized on the banjo twang and mellow builds of album closer ‘Maker’ where Vu asks some greater unknown power: “Can you make me anybody else?” Hana Vu might not have that answer, but Public Storage is still a dream of a full debut.On Public Storage, Vu’s official debut and her first release for Ghostly, that emotional core diffuses. She also talks about imagining a desolate character, “crying out to an ultimately punitive force for something more”, and that brooding sense of discovery takes Public Storage to places of introspective rumination that’s dreamy and soulful, but also searching. Inspired by public storage units her family would use every few years as they moved, Vu calls the music here “very invasive and intense”. ![]() Vu then finds her power pop vocal on the guitar-driven, orchestral pomp of ‘Gutter’, shifts gears on the angsty disco of ‘Aubade’, and also makes ‘Everybody’s Birthday’ sound as aloof and glamorous as a Beverly Hills party you weren’t invited to. On the title track, that sad voice evolves into something more confident and assertive, cutting free without entirely cutting loose – a song destined for a world of cinematic, rain-soaked soundtracks. ![]() Opener ‘April Fool’ leads in softly with sparse piano and a pleading, spotlighted vocal. Here, on Public Storage, Hana Vu absolutely blooms. And while that self-production has been more solid than expansive, it’s incredibly impressive for an artist who was still at the tail end of her teens at the time.īut with a world-weariness that belies her years, and a contralto voice that simultaneously adds depth and distance, those early EPs left plenty of room to grow. On her 2018 EP, Crying on the Subway, and its follow-up, Nicole Kidman/Anne Hathaway, Vu has continued to explore her sound. Developing in the LA DIY scene, Hana Vu’s bedroom pop has always suggested there’s something grander to come. ![]()
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |