‘Romanticism’ by Hana Vu
‘Romanticism’ by Hana Vu
“There’s no song in my heart/Like I thought there was/When I was young and I fell apart,” Hana Vu sings on “Look Alive,” the opening track on her new long-player, Romanticism. With those words, the L.A.-based singer-songwriter nods to the grand emotions of the 18th-century art movement the LP is named for, although the music acknowledges that something like a song remains.
The difference, perhaps, is that “Look Alive” and the 11 songs that follow it are not odes to euphoria and contentment; they are admissions of sadness and explorations of restlessness. They are heavy songs in, or from, a heavy heart.
Vu doesn’t let the heaviness become oppressive, however: she co-produces with Jackson Phillips, the Day Wave main man whose dream-pop flourishes flow, like water reflecting a blue sky, over Vu’s indie melodicism and all-too-awake, all-too-aware realizations of what she’s lost while she’s gained age and experience.
With Phillips and Vu also playing all the instruments except one, they keep a tight and small combo focus on these distinctly non-teenage calls to an uncaring universe, and they often combine the midnight muffling of bedroom recordings and the intense, dank closeness of a basement rock show.
Vocally, Vu is familiar with each side of that combination, whether darkly quoting Tears for Fears on the grungily poetic “Find Me Under Wilted Trees,” wielding guitar riffs like saw blades against the Taylor Swiftian heartbreak of “22” (not a cover of Swift’s song) or sprinkling a glimmer of 1990s folk-pop glamour over the sentimental sadness of “I Draw a Heart.”
When Hana Vu closes Romanticism with “Love,” a terse three minutes of acoustic strumming and Pixies grinding, she makes a decision about a feeling: “I’ll just keep it in thought/And keep it in song.” The wobbly beauty of Maegan Houang’s cello during the fade-out emphasizes how good it is that Vu hasn’t kept it from us.
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