Funny how, after more than 30 years, the Van Pelt is influential enough to be a reference point for generations of underground bands yet still elusive enough to live up to the title of its fifth album. Officially out tomorrow, Remain Obscure (Ernest Jenning) brings fresh legs to a story that began with the ’90s post-hardcore touchstones Stealing From Our Favorite Thieves and Sultans Of Sentiment. Under the leadership of singer/guitarist Chris Leo, the Van Pelt emerged from New York’s indie-rock underground with a compelling formula built around interlocking guitars and willfully literate lyrics delivered in Leo’s distinctive spoken-word fashion.
Even after the band broke up in 1997, its reputation continued to spread, eventually prompting reunions in 2009 and 2014. There was also the release of Imaginary Third, a 2014 collection of late-’90s tracks from the Van Pelt and its successor, the Lapse. A more substantial second chapter arrived with 2023’s Artisans & Merchants, the Van Pelt’s first album of new material in more than 25 years. Remain Obscure picks it up from there.
Here’s the rundown from Leo.
1) “Kris Is Riding Horses In Ojai”
“A call to arms for all the sleeper cells of dreamers who’ve been dispersed and compromised by life, but whose inner flames can’t be doused. There are gods still left to slay, so come out and play.”
2) “Linens Should Be Freshly Pressed”
“This revisits Keats’ ‘beauty is truth, truth beauty’ through the banalities of a day job, before becoming a couple’s argument about the blurred line between the insignificant and the meaningful. Musically, it was started on keys. It might not sound like such an earth-shattering fact to anyone reading this, but for us, moving away from decades of dueling guitars felt almost titillatingly taboo.”
3) “Arid As The Aral”
“OK, let’s imagine you were to walk into my wine shop and ask me to show you my most peculiar wine. Imagine that I were to take a wine off the shelves and say, ‘Fifty percent of the people who come into this shop don’t buy this wine. Of the 50 percent who do, 50 percent return it because it didn’t work for them. Of the 25 percent remaining, 50 percent of those are too embarrassed to return it even though it didn’t work for them either. That leaves 12.5 percent of people who this wine works for. Wanna buy it?’ That’s what modern marriage looks like. So what’s to become of the other 87.5 percent of us? Obviously, with stats like that, you’d be pretty damn sure that we as a society were deep in dialogue about what to do now, right? We’d be understanding and consoling when someone didn’t fit into a rigid mold crafted millennia ago, right? We’d offer the struggling parties a hug rather than a burning stake in 1660 Salem, Mass., right? Right?”
4) “City Of Dead Ends”
“Another one that wasn’t just begun on keys but remained largely keys—and sax. The female vox you hear on this song—and all songs on this album with female vox—are from our secret weapon, Sarah Schimeneck. Like a true Remain Obscureer, Philadelphia was too findable for Sarah. She moved to Atlantic City, where no soul, living or dead, would ever dream about putting restraints on weirdness.”
5) “Rally Song For Marianne”
“Another song that gets back to our stubborn refusal as a society to have meaningful vulnerable dialogue despite having more ways to do so than ever before. I’m convinced Y2K happened. Y2K was the threshold, the final battle between analog and digital that we all in fact thought it would be. We were all correct to worry about a collapse. We just didn’t realize which side would bring it on.”
6) “Frank’s Jukebox”
“There were only few times in my life when I was ever jealous about someone else’s band. I remember watching Heroin play ABC No Rio once, and I did wish I was in the band. I also still wish I was in Fleetwood Mac every now and then. Lyrically, Al Stewart’s ‘Year Of The Cat’ hits that unattainable I love so much I sometimes get pissed I can’t reach those heights myself. That said, I can only be me. While I do think I’m a romantic, I’m an admittedly problematic one that instigates, provokes and never shuts up at my own peril. This is my go at giving back the only ‘Year Of The Cat’ I’m capable of.”
7) “Flaws Of Attraction”
“This began with just vox over a metronome. We tried this out on our last album with the song ‘We Gotta Leave.’ It’s such a fun way to write a song, considering it’s not like I’m over here crooning out a banger for the ages. I can barely make it through a sentence without choking on my own tongue.”
8) “A Voralberg Of The Mind”
“The anthem that hits closest to the album’s name—a longing for a place far, far away from the entrapments of societal success, a place where leisure and pointless pursuits are built into the day to day, a place that understands that the spotlight is the death knell. Celebrate your liberating anonymity with us by yodeling it from the highest peaks where you—and only you—can hear it echo back.”
9) “Martha Graham And The Moon”
“One of several rad riffs (guitarist) Brian (Maryansky) sent us from his basement in Salem—2024, not 1660. ‘Frank’s Jukebox’ is another one. While we each bring vastly different—sometimes oppositional—influences to this band, there are some foundations we couldn’t move away from even if we tried. It’s the music that formed our DNA when we were empty sponges coming up: the Edge, Peter Buck and everything Guy Picciotto ever laid his hands on.”
10) “Lawrence, KS”
“There’s nothing like a blast of complete transparency to render you utterly confused.”
11) “Death By A Solid Argument”
“This is one for all the centrist Democrats out there—the word police, the line-towers, the circadian-rhythm abiders, the Iowa Writers’ Workshop readers, etc. The riskiest thing you can do is being as risk averse as you are. What a slow, miserable, non-noteworthy death risk-aversion is condemning us all to. I feel like I’m about to be run over by a street cleaner moving two miles an hour down the street.”
