It's difficult to know where to start with Vinny Miller. In certain circles he's already acquired semi-legendary status - after all, he managed to spend the best part of five years signed to 4AD without delivering a note of music to the label.
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It's difficult to know where to start with Vinny Miller. In certain circles he's already acquired semi-legendary status - after all, he managed to spend the best part of five years signed to 4AD without delivering a note of music to the label. His debut album, On The Block, finally arrived in April 2004. It was so otherworldly, so bountifully strange that most points of reference are just exercises in futility. About the man himself there's little to tell. He lives in Dorset these days, having spent a few penurious and ever-so-slightly self-destructive years in various scruffy parts of London. Interested parties are perhaps better off abandoning biography and scrutinising his recordings, where there are clues to be found, half-buried, swathed in static. For a start, this is man who chooses to break his epic silence with something as baffling, perturbing and hilarious as ‘The Yes / No Game’. It's a fleeting scrap of pirate radio snatched from London's teeming midnight skies and preserved in eerie aspic, with Vinny barely audible as the stoned, wary weirdo at the other end of a crackling phone line. But the following track – ‘Breaking Out Of Your Arms’ - immediately changes the picture. 'Breaking Out Of Your Arms' is a heartbreakingly fragile and disarmingly simple ballad, Vinny's fractured falsetto emerging from a haze of tape noise and bringing with it the gift for genuinely haunting, utterly surreptitious melodic invention that surfaces throughout the record. Take these two songs together, and a picture starts to come into focus - of an unusually gifted singer who refuses to be content with stock manoeuvres. On The Block is the sound of a man pushing things as far as he can, constantly shifting away from the easy option. There's a ferocious, driven playfulness at work, for instance, in ‘Cromagno’, a multitracked, slavering howl which is barely endurable even for its brief 30 second span. But listen carefully to the barnstorming, visceral ‘Hogbreath Busts A Move’ - slotted into its place in the mix, that howl is resolved into a deranged Beach Boys harmony vocal, all flashing teeth and gleeful energy. Elsewhere the mood is one of glacial introspection, but Vinny never lets these periods of stasis languish undisrupted. The dazed, digital drift of 'Afternoon Nod' gives way the turbulent, churning ‘Bogeyeater’, while the emotionally numb ‘Alioth’ eventually strengthens and surges with thrilling certainty. At the end comes ‘On The Block’ itself: a stately, dreamlike strum laced with some some truly otherworldly singing, Miller's falsetto climbing to impossible heights before vanishing into the stratosphere. It's a magical, unsettling conclusion to an album which somehow manages to remain ungraspable.
