VITAMINSFORYOU
The Legend of Bird’s Hill
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· Electronic nocturnes to the great outdoors.
Bryce Kushnier’s vitaminsforyou have long been the kind of visionary bedroom electronica experience best befitting headphone exploration after dark. With The Legend of Bird’s Hill, Kushnier has created a pop-driven album of soundscapes similar in scope to Caribou’s epic My Bloody Valentine pastiche Up In Flames, albeit of a somewhat gentler sort. Touched by brushes of glockenspiel and gently plucked banjo, lifted by choirs of Kushnier’s voice, the songs of Bird’s Hill are odes to a lost time and place "where the land meets the sea."
Of the several stand-out tracks, "Being Away Fame (A Song for the Xenophobic)" borders on the Postal Service’s territory of long-distance longing and carries the same propulsive drive of Kushnier’s online-blog hit cover of the Arcade Fire’s "No Cars Go," while "It’s Not the Brown that Makes Your Eyes So Pretty" is an ode of love as charming as its title. Referencing his Canadian homeland both through his subject matter ("Welcome to Echo Valley, Saskatchewan" for one) and audio samples ("I Move’s" recorded conversation of an elder’s recollections of wanting to go to Winnipeg in his youth), Bird’s Hill is yet another anomaly in the realm of electronica music, its feet firmly planted on familiar ground.
Alongside a precious few (FourTet and Caribou amongst them), vitaminsforyou achieves the rare feat of creating music on computer that completely overcomes the trappings of its creation. We haven’t invented a computer capable of feelings and emotion as of yet, but Kushnier for one has managed to make music that very nearly makes one think we have.
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