Album Review: Gone by Vacationer

The songs on the debut album from Vacationer move like musical Rube Goldberg machines. Slow-rolling percussion topples tiny blips of guitar in "No Rules," gently swiveling guitar trigger Christmas-light synths in "Gone," and a tumbling electro-harp kicks open the door to let in a ghost choir on "Dreamlike." The pleading voice at the center of these million moving parts belongs to Kenny Vasoli, who croons about romantic regrets and his ache for escape as synth lines sparkle and guitars spiderweb. At times, the music recalls the wistful indiepop of The Shins, but Vasoli is more forlorn and his music is crammed with more tiny details.

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Vacationer's 2012 full-length debut Gone features singer/songwriter Kenny Vasoli's particular mix of psych and sampledelic indie-pop. This is dreamy, lightly funky, and always tripped-out pop that brings to mind a mix of such similarly inclined contemporaries as Beach House and Animal Collective. Vasoli, who often sounds like a mix of Blur's Damon Albarn and Mojave 3's Neil Halstead, clearly has a knack for coming up with yearning, kaleidoscopically melodic, and literate songs, which he produces with a studio-wizard's talent for layered and dense arrangements full of sparkling keyboards, and chiming guitars over hip-hop beats and dusty LP-samples.

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The Starting Line’s Kenny Vasoli has never been afraid to explore non-pop-punk vistas. Exhibit A: the shapeshifting rock outfit Person L. Exhibit B: his new project, Vacationer, and their full-length debut, Gone. (Don’t be fooled by the secrecy surrounding the band—that’s definitely him singing.) The latter focuses on textured indie pop buoyed by tropical percussion, soulful crooning, quirky samples and atmospheric keyboards that’s closer in spirit (and sound) to Vampire Weekend (“Dreamlike”), Broken Bells (“Great Love”) and Grizzly Bear (“Farther”).

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