Vegyn – The Road to Hell Is Paved With Good Intentions
PLZ Make It Ruins
Vegyn’s latest album, The Road to Hell Is Paved With Good Intentions, brushes up against the divine.
The 13-track odyssey is both melancholic and euphoric, a combination that feels like an acceptance of life’s relentlessness. The London-based producer uses holographic synths, glittering electronic organs, lifting orchestral strings, and drums that shift from gentle to frantic to humbled. His highway-lit rhythms make most of The Road to Hell seem in transit, searching for solace in existential wistfulness. The songs swell and retreat, like a forgiving tide, to make room for uncertainty to hug tolerance.
It’s not only Vegyn’s curation of shifting instrumental sound, from jazzy and transcendental to glitchy and trip-hop symphonic, that showcases his dexterity. At the album’s centerfold, three tracks (“Everything Is the Same,” “The Path Less Traveled,” and “Makeshift Tourniquet”) repeat the album’s title in three different tones: one a scratchy, insidiously inhuman voice, the next a distant human echo that feels like a fading memory, and the last that’s closely spoken like a self-reminding mantra. Its meaning morphs and settles like a redemptive exhale and inhale.
Ephemerality can have a negative connotation where no good things last forever, but as Vegyn reminds us, this means that the bad things also fade away—our mistakes, our anxieties, our unexpected nightmares—as we wait for wisdom. It’s like Lauren Auder lovingly emphasizes on highlight “Halo Flip”: “Even when you disappear, you know that you can come right back / It’s all on track.” GRADE: A
You can preview The Road to Hell Is Paved With Good Intentions at Bandcamp and elsewhere.
