I’m not sure if ‘basking’ is quite the right word. ‘Bathing’, or maybe ‘inhaling’? Whatever the right word is, that’s what I’ve been doing with Vapor, the new album from Canadian experimental guitarist Vicky Mettler, a.k.a. Kee Avil. Context: Vapor is a clear continuation of what Mettler has been exploring through her fascinating previous two albums, Crease (2022) and Spine (2024). A few years before that came an eponymous EP, the first two tracks of which offered elusiveness and ethereality, challenged by moments of abrasive force that seemed to come out of nowhere. Not so much complex songs as complicated acts of singing. In hindsight, closing track ‘Space 1.5’ pointed emphatically toward everything that would come next, Mettler seemingly trying to coax or articulate something from her instrument, vocals distilled into bands of vowel – whereupon all solidity vanished, breaking down into a semi-liquid state, a broth of elements.
Both Crease and Spine occupy the world established by ‘Space 1.5’, and on the strength of Vapor, Mettler isn’t done with it yet. At 25 minutes, it’s a short album, and half of the eight songs clock in at less than three minutes. But nothing about Vapor seems miniature, or even brief. Duration here feels like the necessary by-product of both the music’s emotional weight and expressive intimacy, resulting not in anything diminished (compared with Spine or Crease, both much longer) but reduced, distilled, concentrated. And also fragmented, inasmuch as it’s impossible to listen to these eight songs as anything other than components of the larger whole.
Their most prevalent feature is a perpetual teetering instability. Yet from one perspective, it’s tempting to hear Vapor as Mettler’s most conventional release to date. Song structures compute, their narratives parse, it’s even possible to make out her lyrics more clearly – though there’s little sense of ease, in terms of the what and the how of these songs’ mode of expression. The start of opening track ‘itch’ is a case in point. The words are disquieting:
i’ll teach you how to cry
teach you how to scream
and i’ll teach you how to dream
and i’ll never have to hide
if i teach you how to draw me in my best light
A decidedly mixed juxtaposition, which feels all the more uncomfortable sung over a gentle, soft-pedalled piano accompaniment. The words seem at least partially self-directed, like looking in a mirror, and while they’re cool and measured, at a later reference to scratching “an itch / you never knew you had”, the song tilts, slightly pulling apart and continuing askew, and it’s if we’re able to see beneath the hitherto composed surface, glimpsing something troubling. The next verse recoils from this, snapping back into focus and the song continues its precarious way forward.
This is reinforced in second track ‘un’, where buzz accents pound into the skull, setting up a scrappy pulse, the basis for a wonderfully glitch-flecked bit of electronica, the French lyrics skittering across its surface. The end of the chorus – “C’est juste le soleil qui m’a délaissé” [It’s just that the sun that has forsaken me] – reinforces a sense of normality and order to the song, but just as an instrumental gets going to affirm this, it’s cancelled, and as the words continue the accompaniment (with more distant echoes of ‘Space 1.5’) is liquidised, losing coherence. Elements drift and collide; Mettler restates the end of the chorus again, as if to get things back on track, and sure enough, just like in ‘itch’, focus and coherence suddenly return.
Vapor isn’t always so liminal. ‘crying’ walks a more stable path, at a slower pace with the textures often acting like a mandorla (albeit a noisy, gritty one) around the voice. That in itself sets up an interesting tension, between the gentle calm of the lyrics and the intrusive energy of everything else, but it’s held in check. ‘clic’ is similar, a track that immediately suggests a relatively straightforward, cheerful song, yet rendered skeletal and strange, while the vocals don’t really match or align in terms of character or metre. The middle 8 – “Had a dream I was awake / But never realised I’d have to wake up / Was just a dream / What a waste” – acts as another peering beneath the surface at the darker reality within. And ‘sen’ is deep, slow and warm, but its solidity is militated against by squelching electronic coils while a guitar pushes on, asserting normality until it too slips sideways. Nonetheless, the song continues unimpeded, dominated by Mettler’s breathy voice.
Elsewhere things are more conflicted. ‘beg’ has barely any accompaniment at all, as if everything had been muffled, except for the vocals, incredibly close, breathing directly into our ears. No beats, just regular ticking tumbles of clicks, garnished with noise and the barest trace of bassline. Less skeletal than lean, a song shorn of all excess fat, elements polarised between near and far. It’s a track that feels like it might (need to) explode eventually, but ends up doing the opposite, abruptly breaking down at the final line, “please release me”. Many more beats proliferate in ‘delay’ but they’re light and plunky, almost like random bouncing figurations that accidentally line up sufficiently to construct a pulse. The most sonically beautiful track on Vapor, ‘delay’ features a lovely focus on Mettler’s voice, ringing tones doubling her melody, the accompanying texture gently supporting, while the ringing embellishes the end of each chorus. The beats fill out slightly, and the song really feels like it’s getting into its stride – only, once again, to be crudely silenced.
Final tracks don’t have to be summations, epilogues, or syntheses, but ‘meld’ kind of works as all three. There’s a distinct whiff of Goldfrapp in the surly bassline lurking in its claustrophobic shadows. It has the makings of something anthemic, a floor-stomper perhaps, but the pulse is irregular and fibrillating, making the song lurch. ‘meld’ ramps up slightly after a spaced-out chorus, but the clarity becomes blurred, vocals distorted and lost within reverb and sharp glitch fragments. Bringing Vapor to a close, it’s the album’s most mesmerising sequence, continually pushing ahead, continually pulling back, bend, stretch, flex, muscle, sinew, bone.
Released on NNA Tapes throughout the year in a sequence Mettler describes as a “sonic diary”, Vapor is available on digital.
