vaneyes - skip

vaneyes

skip
self-released; 2016

4.0 out of 5 - TOP ALBUM

By William Morrow

Some people are just really good at writing songs. It’s really fun to sit down and listen to an album that sounds like it was written with ease. In his newest album titled skip, vaneyes illustrates his amazing ability to craft beautifully simple songs in a very modest context. If you’re into singer/songwriter, folksy stuff that explores the limits of both of those genres, I recommend you investigate skip. 

skip is a very warm sounding record. The audio quality is not the best, and it doesn’t sound like vaneyes spent an extensive amount of time recording/producing the music, but the fact that it is so rough around the edges that this is part of what makes it so beautiful. The haphazard production quality gives the music a very distinct lo-fi type of feel that, paired with the soothing, serene sounding vocals, seems to all fall into place quite eloquently. 

Although the music itself is fairly simple in nature, I think there is a lot of diversity found on this album. There are very low-key, acoustic songs that exhibit vaneyes’ peaceful, more tranquil side, and there are full-band songs that rock. My personal favorite tune “Suburbansky” is absolutely hypnotic, and actually features what sounds like vocoded vocals. The song demonstrates vaneyes’ ability to interweave guitar and vocal melodies. 

I also would like to note that most of these pieces of music are really catchy. Whether it be the chord progressions, riffs or melodies, it was hard not to find myself entranced by the music. The song “Singing Songs” immediately pulled me in giving me a very enjoyable “Wilco” impression. It is one of the few distinctly upbeat tunes on skip, so the juxtaposition that it imposes with some of the more melancholy selections proved to be really nice, especially preceding the last, heavy track titled “Who is there to blame.” 

​I hope skip sees the success it deserves. I cannot imagine someone actively disliking this album, and if I had to guess, I would say that if you were to give it a chance, you would enjoy it, too. I hope that vaneyes continues to make music in the future and is able to build upon what he has already done and is currently doing.

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