PT089: Vorn - Modern Classics (CD Album) 2009
Vorn's Modern Classics is the work of an artist at the very peak of his game, a blind fury of creation that takes pop music as we know it, pulls its ironic vintage T-shirt over its head, batters it with a sock full of dollar coins, and leaves it stunned, bruised, and strangely grateful. Besides being a clutch of mature, perfectly crafted pop songs, rich in texture and unceasingly varying in tone, the Modern Classics are a work of musical revisionism - an alternative history of rock and/or roll. Listening to this album, you step into a world where Abbey Road and Teen Pan Alley are midgets, overshadowed by the bedrooms and garages of Dunedin and Wellington. Where hip-hop starts with The Great Unwashed, and Phil Spector waves his revolver at a young Don MacGlashan in Chris Knox's garage - a concept album written for an age of iShuffling single-worshippers. All the hallmarks of previous Vorn albums are there in spades - barbed-wire-sharp lyrics, stylistic U-turns, insanely catchy melodies - but here they are joined by lush horns, soaring strings, and a sense of the big studio production of the 60s jammed into a damp basement in Johnsonville. Listen on these works, ye mighty, and despair.
US: $13.95
NZ: $20.00
