What year is this? Jesus Fucking Christ

There’s a temptation to look back at our hominid ancestors and think of them as primitive savages, that our forebears struggled through their lives dragging their knuckles on the ground, grunting at one another and wearing a few strips of fur and leather. Of course, we are far more sophisticated and civilised and erudite and intelligent than those unenlightened apes…

But perceiving them in this light does a great injustice to the generations before us. Our early ancestors may not have had the luxury of sophisticated language or the tools to articulate themselves in the profundity possible today, but that doesn’t mean to say they didn’t feel the same ways, feel the same things that we do, with the same intensity and the same need for communication that we desire. Discoveries of delicate bone flutes prove our musical heritage, paintings on cave walls our painterly: we are, and always have been, a sensitive species. Modernity has simply expanded the scope of our creative expression.

In recent time, with the advent of more capable and more accessible electronic tools, the realms of possibility have opened up further, taking us into new sonic spaces previously unimaginable. Clarence Clarity, as I’ve talked about before, is a singular artist whose genre bending albums sit in a world all their own: yet despite the modern gloss and some of the topics he’s handled, much of his concerns & anxieties are timeless. Vanishing Act II is not an exception to this, and though it would fry every caveman’s synapses, its intent would be understandable even if Clarence’s approach this time is more abstruse than his usual.

It’s hard to approach a CC record given their maximalism and lyrical abstraction. VA2 is somewhat different to the likes of its predecessors NO:NOW and THINK:PEACE as it doesn’t have the same chaptered seamless flow and idiosyncratic internal callbacks. And it’s hard to define but, despite it feeling distinctly like a Clarence record, his experimental productions in the six years since T:P have definitely cumulated into a changed artist.

“Deepest Sea Regret (Resurfaced)” perhaps is the best example of this, having been saved from the bowels of the 5KHz filtration of 2022’s UNRECORDED HISTORY to appear in all its, ahem, clarity, singing as it does on digital jealousy and leaving his love behind in a surprisingly direct way. Of course, nobody ever seems to be able to be left behind in the world of the online, with followup, closer, “Guinevere” shifting on shimmering chorals and effervescent synthetics that still terminates in an empty dial tone.

“even after all that we have been through” staggers by in pitched up staccato vocals, phasing in and out of coherence as both melody and lyrics move through fields of distortion, lensing through teardrops filling eyeballs before bottoming out into distant spoken word rumination: “halfway home before…you’re out the door…”. And whilst no two tracks really feel directly, aesthetically related, it does find an equal of sorts in later “juliano so cute lowkey” which moves in slightly more self-assured verses, keeping itself more buoyant and pacey even despite the abstraction brought to the lyrics.

Some of the most impactful pieces are these more “straightforwardly” presented tracks: “Old King, The World Moved On” with its groovy 80s guitar licks and playful CC maximalism feels quintessential, if somewhat submerged in processing. Then its heart gets ripped out and all of a sudden it’s heaving and moving slowly, ominously, as the collapse finally brings down the pair it speaks of. It sits well with personal standout “Greatest Living Musician, Found Dead” whose vocals are the most clearly expressed than anywhere else here, joined as they are by impassioned percussion and overdriven guitars in burgeoning melodrama:

I’ll be better in a little while
Yeah I’ll be better, when I’m in denial
You’re still in love with your hate
And I’m in love with you

Perhaps the most interesting thing about these tens of thousands of years is that we’re still singing about love and loss, the various complications of the heart. Sure we might have uniquely modern troubles unfathomable to our Stone Age cousins but is there anything more timeless than heartbreak, than the wiles of the heart? Because at the end of the day, despite the fancy production and complicated, sometimes impenetrable lyrics, this is the crux of Ultimate Reality, and in the same way we can’t escape these prehistoric cliches, neither, seemingly, can Clarence.