Kleenex Girl Wonder; Photo Credit: Graham Smith
Indie rock band Kleenex Girl Wonder’s upcoming album, Vana Mundi, which arrives tomorrow (May 20th) in digital format, and June 22nd in physical form, is a gloriously melodic dive into the deep alienation of contemporary life, with lyrics so simply profound that they have to be heard in order to be felt.
It’s the most wondrous, hopeful album of New Yorker (by way of Chicago) Graham Smith’s career, and it will also improve your vocabulary. Here’s a list of just some of the words on the album that you didn’t learn in high school: anechoic, profligate (Well, maybe that one…), elided, ultimata, opaline, convolve, dramaturge, cenotaph, heuristic. The lyric sheet’s word count comes in at just over 4,000. You might say Smith missed his true calling as a short story writer or playwright, except his songs are so darn catchy.
In Latin, the album’s title means ‘Empty World.’ In Esperanto, the title means ‘Vain World,’ vain as in wasted effort, or the inflated ego — all is vanity. Either way, Smith knows all about emptiness, wasted effort, and inflated egos. The album is an attempt to come to try and understand those qualities as they exist within himself and those around him.
The Big Takeover is pleased to premiere a track off Vana Mundi, the power-popper/slacker-rocker “Tratteggio” that grooves with a skewed indie rock vibe and is immersed in the constantly running words of a dryly wry Smith. Keep your ears pricked and your mind aligned while you absorb the rock and take stock of Smith’s pointed and involving lyrics.
