VA Violet
Having released a plethora of DIY bedroom-pop jams on Bandcamp in recent months/years; San Francisco’s Yoodoo Park (also of GRMLN) presents the latest entry in the VA Violet canon with the album II. As a solo artist, Park takes on the challenges to emulate icons & heroes while extending upon those original blueprints with new illustrations of heart-informed expression.
II takes off with the devout lead-in track “Devotion” that exemplifies everything from the divine, the destructive & the destitute in one dramatic intro number. The feeling of being stuck on an island rings on the marooned “Lagoon” rife with reiterations of you’re tearing me apart that segues into the loved & lauded single that ponders matters of solitary reflection & reckoning on “Mirror”. Other familiar favorites are heard on the urgent emotive energy of “Take Me” that resonates to each listener differently as low-laying places & mental spaces can be felt, while “Hong Kong” feels like an evening spent running about in the iconic urban Chinese city of the same name.
VA Violet creates a fine tightrope musical walk between the gravity pull of stripped-down punk rock ethics & ethereal atmospherics elements heard on “Evil Elvis” that straddles these two respective realms beautifully before tumbling into the post-punk dream-scape of “Lum”. Like the metropolitan visions heard on “Hong Kong”, the closing cut “Cyber City” is something of a re-imagined rendering of Yoodoo’s SF home base where the listener catches a rhythmic ride-share through the thorough fares of Folsom Street, Division Street, Mission Street & more in an energetic tour de force. II will tide you over until the next sporadic VA Violet release or GRMLN offering. Yoodoo park shared the following exclusive introduction to the new album:
I recorded II after spending some time in Australia and Japan, writing songs to record. And after getting back to California, I just sat down and recorded the songs in my garage. The songs that ends up on this album were the songs that stuck to me and really felt like it represented the feeling I wanted to show in my songs.
