PLZ Make It Ruins Vinyl & CDs

Review: As part of Vegyn's more recent movements away from abstract, snappy electronica and into more dream pop and indie-intoned directions, the producer personally known as Joe Thornalley now debuts a new project, Headache, in collaboration with an elusive collaborator, Francis Hornsby Clark. Like the indeterminacy of the Double Virgo release also put out on PLZ last year, The Head Hurts but the Heart Knows the Truth is stylistically myriad. A surreal project, it arrests the subconscious with neurotic monologues from an unnamed AI narrator - a true sense of alienation seeming to waft from their lonesome, but characteristically British-accented dialogue - all of which are laid to indie-electronic beats in the reminiscent style of Saint Etienne or Boards Of Canada. An ultimately sad and limit-experiential album, which seems to constantly scream at the listener, "wake up!"

Review: After a flurry of announcements and teasers comes Vegyn's latest record The Road To Hell Is Paved With Good Intentions. Arguably more of an aesthetic regrounding compared an long spell of style-establishing wonders, this record hears Joe Thornalley revive his original alias, and is unabashed in its involving of several London-centric all-star vocalists including John Glacier, Matt Maltese, Ethan P. Flynn, Lea Sen and Lauren Auder. All are heard banding together to ruminate on themes of faith, self-acutalization and eternity, together spanning multiple registers and gliding serenely over Vegyn's various dream-jungle, trap, pop and post-everything beats. Even the non-featured tracks contain vocal delights, with highlight 'Everything Is The Same' pitching up what we can only assume to be Vegyn's own, in a glitzed-out take on a Jai Paul-esque beatscape.

Review: The Road To Hell Is Paved With Good Intentions a rare kind of affirmation, one that has the power to course-correct many a sensitive soul whose 'meaning well' might have more unintended negative consequences than good. It's also exactly the kind of title that London experimental electronic producer Vegyn would choose for a mixtape-album; it inspires a kind of wisdom-starved curiosity in those who might seek to plug that gap via the music of an artist more experienced than they. But in this case, beyond this title, Vegyn has no further wisdom to impart than reams of his signature trip-hop and IDM glossouts, featuring fellow London regulars such as Ethan P. Flynn, Lauren Auder, Lea Sen and John Glacier; the album is transcendent in timbre, seeming to constantly push at the limits of Vegyn's stereotypically snappier and sparser sound.