Vegyn - Like A Good Old Friend

March 19, 2021 - PLZ Make It Ruins

DIY is a really tough aesthetic to maintain, even if it’s built on an authentic foundation.

In the bright, painful early days of my fine arts education, a well-intentioned graduate student teaching assistant told me in a critique that my piece was “too compositionally perfect.” I had no idea what she meant. How can a painting be too perfect? And how does “too perfect” reduce my grade on the assignment from an A to a B–?

Well, that was many cat lives ago, and I’ve since learned that the most memorable moments of culture I experience and remember are far from aesthetic perfection. This is probably a bend of this moment in time that my descendants will chuckle about, but what I find so attractive about great works of creativity is that I can see the residue of feeling, action, and reaction. I can see the human or elephant that made them, in them. We live in a world where Photoshop can smooth out lens distortion to craft straight lines, and where Ableton can smooth out sound dissonance. Don’t tell the perfectionists, but perfection as we understand it is nearly achievable. Though I’m not sure to what end that brings our imperfect senses. It seems culture is becoming less and less friendly every day. But I might just be getting old. 

London-based producer Joe Thornalley, aka Vegyn, is a paradox of sorts. He is a master of perfection and also a master of loose, effortless-appearing musical syntax. He has worked with the likes of Frank Ocean, Kyla Uchis, and JPEGMAFIA to help craft this new artsy self-aware post-hip-hop-pop-rap-R&B deconstruction we find ourselves absolutely relishing in. The rise of the avant-garde social approach seems to represent a mass intellectual and fatalistic acceptance of consumer culture and indulgence, a sharp exhale of emotions while drowning in a waterfall of fame, fashion, money and the pursuit of them all. It’s a tragic existence, but it does enjoy piling on gems with a nihilistic devil-may-care attitude, because we’re all supposed to enjoy that. Thornally is right in the middle of it all, piling it on, a master aesthetician, a trendsetter, a sound inventor. In that way, Vegyn’s new album Like A Good Old Friend both shines brilliantly and fades away into the background. It’s almost a perfect 50/50 split of songs that transcend their “compositional perfection” and songs that don’t. 

Before I delve into that opinion further, I would like to first address this idea of high visibility perfect imperfection that seems to be the soup-du-jour. There’s always been an art to putting together trendy outfits, though as a heavy caveat, I used to define “trendy” as matching my shoes, shirt, headband and eyeshadow. (Ironically, I’m sure this level of matching is actually beginning to trend now.) I’ve been attempting to make more intentional choices with the clothes I wear out in public (probably a reaction to living in leggings and a rat-like not-cute overgrown haircut for the past pandemic). In such endeavors, I’ve noticed that I can’t achieve the look of effortlessness without immense amounts of effort, which leads me to think that it’s all such an unattainable illusion. You can’t truly not care. It takes time and research to put together an outfit that makes you look like you threw on all the decades of your parents’ existence before they birthed you. It takes money and products to make your skin look dewy without makeup. And it takes time, talent, and immense effort to make music that appears perfectly loose, freeform, improvised, and like a DIY-robotic deconstruction of modern culture, especially using electronic production equipment. It’s easy to make a bad abstraction. It’s hard to make a really good one. 

Like A Good Old Friend opens in fire with ‘I See You Sometimes,’ which features the lyrics of UK-rapper Jeshi. Driven by a heavy cadence like a pounding heartbeat, the track has momentous energy. Before Jeshi is introduced, Vegyn warms us up for a bit of emotional exertion, with a beat like a bouncing rubber ball, tossed-in sampled drips of water, and a cutup voice as percussive textures that eventually drop us down, down, down into the deep water. The chords float beneath the laid-back delivery of Jeshi’s words of performance and regret and unresolved conflict. Those chords lift and churn the water like a bubble net, then resolving into a pattern that vibes like cruising down an endless highway on the ocean floor. Vegyn and Jeshi react beautifully with each other. It’s such a great introduction. 

As the album continues, the radiation from the first track is revealed to provide a more intermittent warmth. My molecules were so active upon first listen, but they got really confused along the way. While all harmonious and with Vegyn’s signature loose syntax, the songs are hot and cold and thus left me lukewarm. I wasn’t set up for an ambient experience. It is clear that Vegyn’s comfort zone is collaboration, and that his ideas fall into a more unmemorable space when presented in isolation. But the ups and downs can’t completely be explained by that alone. ‘I See You Sometimes’ is dynamic and exciting, but ‘So Much Time - So Little Time’ which features John Glacier feels like becoming trapped in a psychedelic dream—so monotonous from the listening distance that you just have to wait it out. And ‘B4 The Computer Crash’ is a brilliant completely instrumental ballad without a feature note but with everything you could ever want in a good storybook—driven action from the start, a melodic peak, a shift in energy at a moment of realization, and great conclusion. I even enjoy the epilogue, as Vegyn sweeps us away from that track like seeds in the wind. The song has attraction to its own momentum the way magnets feel in your hands. It’s my favorite because the elements each exist on their own while also becoming a stable woven tapestry together. You could hang it on a wall and tell its story to your kids and grandkids. 

All in all, I think the tracklist on Like A Good Old Friend needed a bit of editing. The aforementioned song highlights sit at a lofty distance in the atmosphere, while the other songs feel a bit like fillers. ‘Mushroom Abolitionist’ and ‘Sometimes I Feel Like I’m Ruining Songs’ in particular are pleasant to listen to and too polished, too smooth to remember. They don’t seem to elevate the other tracks on the album in any way either, almost becoming obstacles, energy vampires that cool the listener off from the powerful force where she wants to stay vibrating. Overall, it’s a perfect B–. ☔