2019 Roundup // Vagabon - Vagabon

October 18, 2019 - Nonesuch Records

2019 is coming to a close (praise be) and we here at We Hate Music would like to highlight some of the records that slipped through the cracks. Happy Holidays and hope you enjoy.

Cameroonian-American artist Laetitia Tamko’s second full-length album is self-titled Vagabon. It has been on repeat in my cozy studio at home for a while now. She pressed it onto a beautiful vinyl, a translucent orange that brightens up the winter as it spins auditory spells into the air like shots of Vitamin C, fortifying and rejuvenating. 

Vagabon is my most exciting find from 2019. The songs are impeccably curated. No sound or word is superfluous or out of place. There’s a richness in the specificity of this body of work. Tamko has complete control over the lyrics and the instrumentation, and she’s built a wide world of epic accompaniment for herself to sing inside of. Her lyrics sing of the drama of love and love lost, a grappling commentary of high emotional intelligence to the people in her life. It’s an ancient subject matter, but reimagined through a new and modern perspective. Love is one of the most human things about being human, and I think we will always be interested in it—having it, losing it, talking about it, grappling with it through a modern perspective. And in a world where we are increasingly struggling to have the love we crave, Tamko responds with what I would consider a radical honesty. 

Her tone is conversational, casual, and perhaps it gives away her age and the age of those she sings to with phrases like, “wreck my shit all over again,” “you settled for solo,” and “I’ll stay with you in our bed, it feels so good.” I’ll admit there are moments on this album when, looking at lyrics alone, my parents just wouldn’t understand. Tamko’s lyrics are as easy as a conversation between you and your best friend. And once she disarms you and enchants you into the conversation, she starts to experiment. You as a listener are transformed into the object of her messages and thus the poetry of her word play. In my favorite track, ‘Waters Me Down,’ you are a former lover who has judged her harshly into a narrow box, and she calls you out for it in a kind and heavenly way, surrounded by the sounds of a warm waterfall that weaves in and out of her words. In ‘Flood,’ you are the Katherine to her Heathcliff as she sings of your fatalistic connection to her heart’s desire. In ‘Home Soon,’ you are the recipient of some sort of spiritually significant offering, carried to you by the mantra of the hymnal swells. In ‘Every Woman,’ you are the woman who takes the pill in the morning, putting more into this life than it gives back to you, feeling the contradiction between the role of being a woman today and being in love with another. ‘Please Don’t Leave the Table’ makes light of a completely relatable miscommunication with a completely relatable joke. Then somehow you realize, without the fear instilled by a room full of poets, poetry is happening all around you. 

Many songwriters get wrapped up thinking that high volumes of emotion require highly complex language to communicate them. It’s as though they are trying to prove that their experience is different than, harder than, more real than what other people feel. An exclusive club. Like those 20th-century French philosophers who believed ideas were not worth writing down if the people who read them found them easy to understand. But Tamko realizes the true power here and now is to let the music itself carry the weight of the emotions and let the lyrics relate to the people she is speaking out to. The result is clear intent and clear connection between listener and musician, something we crave in this disconnected void. We have plenty of French philosophy to read about on Wikipedia. 

There is not one thing you can point to about Vagabon that makes it revolutionary or ground-breaking. Tamko is not doing anything that someone else hasn’t done before. Her compositional syntax is relatively simple and doesn’t try too hard to become the most radical record on your shelf that you can show off to all your friends at a dinner party. But her work is so fresh, and her voice is so pared down and clear, it’s easy to become addicted to the album. She has the undeniably interesting perspective of an autodidact, someone who is an almost completely self-taught musician. She doesn’t pay attention to the rules assigned by the heavy baggage of history, of a formal education. She doesn’t allow the existential meaning of making music get in the way of the music itself. Vagabon is triumphantly real, unrefined and undefined. ☔