I’m on record, no pun intended, as stating that VAST’s debut release, Visual Audio Sensory Theater, is one of my favorites of all time. It was the right album at the right time with the right density & mixture of sounds, and I still love it.
My relationship with everything that’s come afterward is weirder.
Twenty years ago… and let’s just pause to reflect on the passage of that much time for a tiny not-a-blog that nobody reads… anyway, twenty entire years ago I wrote about the third album, Nude. I could detail the changes in my feelings about and ranking of various songs over the years but you know what? That post holds true enough still today for my purposes. I did, then, look forward to the promise of more progress.
But we have to take a step back first. Things were a mid-2000s-y mess when Nude dropped. Digital distribution (legal and otherwise) was a part of the conversation, a lot of that conversation involving swear words. Record labels were joined, left, created, and abandoned. Online storefronts (anyone remember emusic.com?) came and went. And Jon Crosby, the key figure whose brainchild VAST has always been, tried some stuff. Among the results were the officially released works in progress that became the twin projects Crimson and Turquoise, several pieces of which showed up on the album, Nude. They were later released as a two CD set (Turquoise & Crimson). Confused, yet?
It was a weird year or so in particular. I have several renditions of some songs like “Thrown Away,” “Turquoise,” and especially “Be With Me,” versions of which are on Turquoise and on Nude and the album after that, April. It’s an okay song, but sheesh!
Crosby took to doing a lot more solo acoustic guitar material after that point, and near as I can tell that’s where his muse has taken him. The songs that make up April mostly consist of that sort of thing, with an occasional “full band” sound here & there. And that leads us to my recent purchase of Me and You, a 2009 album that somehow I just didn’t become aware of. Maybe April had turned me off enough to just tune VAST out.
Me and You is… even more down the a-guy-and-his-guitar rabbit hole. While VAST has always carried a strong thread of “one morose voice howling into the chaos,” it’s much more palatable when there’s interesting stuff going on musically. Just one guy’s voice and some acoustic strumming isn’t enough to carry the day.
Three kinds of sadness can come from following an artist through their career: Taken from us too soon. Stagnated, stuck in a rut. Went off in a different direction but it’s not a path you want to follow them down. Here, it’s the latter, and while I won’t be tagging along on VAST’s journeys I will always love the music that brought me this far.