Public Storage

Description

Storage units contain possessions frozen in relation to the outside world, objects capable of reconnecting us with another time or another place. Hana Vu, born in the 2000s in California, grew up regularly using these public storage spaces with her family in Los Angeles, moving very often over the years. She left a mix of the sacred and the mundane inside these concrete and steel places. The 20-year-old musician sees the art of creating songs in a somewhat similar way: these publicly expressed thoughts, these feelings, this baggage and these experiences that accumulate each year come to fill storage units, like albums. She lived next to a storage building when she began writing Public Storage, her first album for Ghostly International. After various releases on Bandcamp, including a collaboration with Willow Smith and covers of The Cure and Phil Collins, she released her first self-produced EP on the Luminelle Recordings label of the music site Gorilla vs. Bear. With her first album, it is the first time she welcomes a co-producer, Jackson Phillips (Day Wave), who helped her create a vast, multi-faceted world in which she can deploy her voice. Her distinctive contralto drifts freely between evocative reflections and touching outbursts. The first sounds are charming: isolated piano notes transform into warm chords and harmonies on "April Fool," as the protagonist imagined by Hana Vu rejects her environment and her ability to communicate. The soft amber glow spreads into the album's title track, a darker, murkier, and noisier place. With its series of provocative rejections (failure, family, magic) and cathartic demands, "Public Storage" is a rare and powerful demonstration of vulnerability from a lyricist who favors the abstract over the autobiographical. Built on a disco synth motif and a groovy bassline, "Aubade" bounces cheerfully in skillful contradiction with its pessimistic subject. The contrast continues on "Keeper," a thrilling new wave track filled with dreamy synths with a gently cantankerous narrator. Rhythmic and melodic, "Everybody's Birthday" deals with the malevolent absurdity of the present and the end of times. Finally, with its banjo/piano foundation, "Maker" is that extremely significant trinket, long lost, that was buried in a box at the back of the storage unit. It logically concludes that we are all doomed, scattered, prone to losing ourselves, and that whoever created us is too.