Track by Track: Vincent Christ – Galore EP

Vincent Christ has a voice and aesthetic that would equally be at home in Bowie/Pop Berlin-era hedonism and the No Wave heyday of 70s New York. Vincent has kindly broken down their recent Galore EP for us as part of our Track By Track feature.

Gymnastics

Some people have noticed that I’ve been particularly prolific in the last 12 months with music and videos. In life we’re all watching the hourglass, but the kind of praxis that results from that is important to me creatively. I wanted to combine that creeping urgency of my earlier music with raucous positivity.

I ended up with Gymnastics, lots of glammed up guitars and lyrics about having ‘a million friends’, I feel like the video gives off this bright feeling too. That said, you can do twelve things at once, it can be a summer’s day, but the water is still slowly climbing the walls.

Mirrors For Thieves

Louis Clark is drumming in VC now, Connor Humphreys is playing bass and Monty Carlos is mixing and playing guitar live. We’re rehearsed and raring to go, so Mirrors For Thieves became a demonstration of the live sound.

I got obsessed with this machine gun effect on the guitar that I discovered using a delay pedal, so that’s all over this record, and I felt like doing a 70s thing on the bass. Lyrically, Mirrors For Thieves concerns the old adage about mirrors and cameras stealing the soul and holding it captive; mirrors are tools of thieves!

Love Song Conspiracy

Often the song titles arrive independent of the songs, or instrumentals name themselves once they’re complete, this time it was the former. The idea came to me to deconstruct the most traditional type of song I could think of, the love song. The idea of adding this paranoid element to something wholesome appealed to me in a cynical way. The instrumental is quite anarchic thanks to the wild drumming and some ring modulated guitar, quite an off-kilter one on the EP.

Midnight To Midnight

Musically this is the most visceral record on Galore. Lyrically, the song vaguely deals with the concept of male gender identity. It’s kind of an ironic men’s empowerment anthem. I’ve come to see it as a camp dig at certain values of male gang mentality. I tried to highlight this with lyrics like ‘dropped to earth with a set of keys, haircut on the cheap’, men caricatured as restless and oblivious.

Bodies

Closing track Bodies is the outlier, an emotional ballad about the fragility of the body and the strength of the spirit. It was built off these screeching EBow guitar lines and has this plodding, stadium feel I’m partial to. It’s by far the most personal and emotionally essential record I’ve released. I’m not comfortable talking about what it’s specifically about, but I feel like it isn’t too hard to work out.

You can download the Galore EP on Bandcamp. Vincent appears at the Camden Rocks All-Dayer on the 6th of May – check out Twitter, Facebook, or Instagram feeds for venue and ticket details.