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His most complete album to date, Chad Van Gaalen's Soft Airplane carries aisles of contradictions through turbulence and diffused sunlight. Here, the talented artist plays to his strengths.
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Soft Airplane feels deeply odd and resoundingly alive.
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Soft Airplane is a little scary (and dark and dank), yet filled with untold creative surprises and delights.
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VanGaalen's first two Sub Pop albums were compelling, but Soft Airplane gives him a stronger identity.
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Soft Airplane’s basement-recorded mastery is equal parts charming and unnerving, and on the whole singularly spectacular.
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The result is an album that is often brilliant, sometimes breathtaking, and never dull.
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What is clear, though, is that this is a finely drawn, funny, animated, and gumdrop authentic record, never less than fascinating in its endless and disburdening involutions.
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An intimate, intelligent, and always transporting cycle of songs that sends VanGaalen closer to his own voice and, in the process, closer to us.
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FilterThe singer's quivering tenor is still fixated on death and a dystopian future....It'd be scarier if it didn't follow a song about a Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles costume, but that's VanGaalen's charm. [Fall 2008, p.98]
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It’s the album’s contradictions and candid emotional messiness that make it exciting.