Album Review: Traditional Noise by April + VISTA
The D.C. duo named their debut after a fake anxiety drug and filled it with songs about losing yourself. The prescription doesn't work, and the album is better for it.
The first thing you hear is a sales pitch. “Are you restless? Afraid? Can’t seem to focus?” a voice asks, calm and clinical, the cadence borrowed from pharmaceutical ads that promise normalcy if you’ll just call your doctor. The product is called Traditional Noise, recommended for anxious adults, and it sounds like someone wrote it out on index cards before reading it into a microphone. Then the actual music hits and the ad disappears. April + VISTA are a duo from Washington, D.C., who’ve been making songs together for over a decade without ever releasing a full album. April George sings and handles piano, violin, and viola; Matthew “VISTA” Thompson produces and engineers. They met at a Busboys and Poets after April found one of his beats through a mutual friend on SoundCloud, both fresh out of Hampton University, bonding just as hard over Portishead as over Donnie Hathaway. Their shorthand for their own music, per a City Cast DC profile: “50% A Moon Shaped Pool, 50% Ludacris Saturday.” After years of EPs and tours with Little Dragon and Little Simz, Traditional Noise is their first full-length, and it doesn’t sound like an introduction. It sounds like something they’ve been putting off.
Two giant trees tower over April on “Two Evergreens” while sticky sap melts in the heat and a crystal lake whistles in the breeze, and it takes a while to realize the whole scene is a love poem. “Her fingertips are folded into mine,” she sings, and that pronoun is the only signal that the trees and the lake and the breeze were never the subject. “Standing in Place” asks someone to stay while flies get plucked from balm and sins get cast into the tide. “Do What You Know” talks about digging a hole to the other side, going lower to reach higher. April grabs the physical world and presses it into service for feelings that don’t have names yet.
At four and a half minutes, “Grotto” stands still long enough to tell a full story. It starts with a confession that is also the whole plot:
“I ran so fast, I left myself behind
Soaking in a brine, weeping through the night.”
From there, April is underwater. Wishes built by other human beings fill a salty sea she’d drown beneath. Ugliness and words orbit her head, fill her lungs with clouds of red. Someone told her faith would leave her dry. She made her way to a grotto looking for a way to wipe her body clean, and the only thing she found was silence: “The silence I pursued emptied out my mind.” The search itself hollowed her out. She starts pleading for “another chance to find that girl I left,” and the song gives up trying to end, settling on waves rolling in.
You can hear the seams in how VISTA built these songs. He and April record most of the music themselves in their home setup. April grew up in a musical family in Virginia Beach where her grandmother made it mandatory to learn an instrument; piano came first, then violin, then viola on her own, and now she composes all her own string arrangements. VISTA started making beats in high school after hearing The College Dropout, downloading FL Studio, producing tracks with his friend Sir E.U. at Friendly High School in Maryland. The influence list (Radiohead, Björk, Hiatus Kaiyote) has been absorbed to the point where no single reference sticks out, and the drums tend to lag behind April’s singing in a way that owes more to trip-hop pacing than to any R&B grid. Interludes (Hello, Rot, Modify Your Transition) split the album into sealed-off sections, each one a door closing behind you.
The album’s sole collaboration is its roughest moment. On “Bless My Heart,” April sings “Lost myself there, bless my heart” while TonyKILL’s ad-libs (“ready if ya want it now,” “how dare you, dare you”) crowd the background. She’s spinning underneath a heavy hand, calling herself “the theory of the running man,” and then something ugly comes through:
“Flush it down the barrel of a gun.”
That same “take you out” phrasing closes “Very Bad News,” the first real song after the opening interlude, where April tells someone “before you claim your throne, there’s something you should know” with deception in their voice and danger in their eyes. The line stitches together a spy-movie opener and a self-obliteration hymn. April never clarifies which meaning belongs where.
Nobody on this album agrees about faith. On “Standing in Place,” April sings:
“My faith alive
I cast my sins into the tide.”
But in “Grotto,” someone warns her that “all that faith will leave you dry,” and on “Morning Star” she buries roots and scorn “all the way down” with blood on the title. She never stops believing, and nobody on the album tells her she’s right to.
The pharmaceutical ad at the top offered to reduce your existential panic, and the songs hand you the panic itself, named and un-fixed. Love freezes in April’s palm on “Love Unspent,” brittle and thin. She shakes it off, holds her breath to make it stop, and just when she felt fine enough she hears a rattling inside a box.
Great (★★★★☆)
Favorite Tracks: “Standing in Place,” “Grotto,” “Bless My Heart”