After having so much genuine fun writing last week’s edition, I felt it’d be quite cool to again review a song that I love, and have been listening to a lot lately; this week’s Track Of The Week is Eighteen Visions’ “Vanity”.
Being the title track from 2002’s ‘Vanity’ album, the album opener and the lead single, it’s clear that 18V saw a lot of potential in this song, and saw it as something more than just the beginning of an album; they saw a hard-hitting track that would go on to shape not only their career but music as a whole (for real).
First off, time to get the personal stuff out the way; for me this may be my favourite song ever recorded. I remember when I first discovered it, it was during an amazing time in my life, and hearing this song will always take me back. Now this wasn’t the first Eighteen Visions track I had ever heard, heck it wasn’t even the first ‘Vanity’ song I’d heard, for years I had been rocking out to “Victim”, and about 6 months prior I had actually began looking back at Eighteen’s back catalogue, only being interested in some of ‘Obsession’ and ‘Until The Ink Runs Out’ (mainly for its stark opposite nature compared to the later 18V material).
No this sadly can’t claim to be the first Eighteen Visions anything for me, however it can claim to being the first time I had ever heard a song that beautifully melded heavy, thrashing hardcore with a soft, almost pop-like tone.
Now bear in mind, at this point I was still a ‘punk-kid’, the days when Rise Against ruled my life, and bands such as Thursday and Anti-Flag were constants on my iPod, not like now where I look like I’ve been plucked straight out of the Chain Reaction during a show circa 2003. To hear such a tempo change take place during a song blew my mind, and for it to happen more than once, it just opened my mind to music and literally changed what I look for in a song.
Now I may have been new to this style of music in late-2011, but after actually listening to metalcore and delving into a lot of different bands from the genre, this tempo change style of music recording has been done by others and has become somewhat of a played out and stale mechanic if I’m honest.
Thing is, sure (many) bands have taken the tempo change thing and ran with it, BUT how many bands did it before 2002’s ‘Vanity’? How many bands changed tempo and went with slower, clearer vocals in different parts of the song, and slammed out guttural screams on the other parts. You’ll find very few, if any, and then when you add the question of who did it right and well, your list diminishes down to zero.
Eighteen Visions were the first band to have songs that used both clear vocals and screams, there I said it!
One of the most impressive aspects of this song, for me, is the lyrics. This is undoubtedly James Hart’s best set of lyrics he had ever written up to this point, and if I’m honest I might even say ever. The lyrics tell a story of a guy that’s madly in love with this girl, where he idealises her, she is everything to him but this feeling isn’t reciprocated in her, where she continues to “make midnight drive-by’s” whilst leaving him alone and one night she stands him up, deciding to leave him for good. The guy begs her to reconsider, to change her mind, even threatening suicide but finally instead realises that he didn’t actually love HER; what he loved was the idea of her, her “plastic perfection”, her “vanity” and so goes out to eventually shoot her dead. He then puts on “her Sunday dress, laced with pink and white”, where it becomes evident that he loved this idea of her so much that he ended up actually wanting to be her, that in his mind she was perfection and he wanted to be just as perfect as she was.
I’m not sure why, but once I actually read about the meaning it conjured up this sense of intrigue in me, I started reading the lyrics to this one song on an almost nightly-basis. The story told was just something I was fascinated in, it was a real story that was compressed into a 5 and a half minute song. Again, like its sound, I had never heard any song to actually present a song that had such a vivid and heart-wrenching tale to it. For the first time ever, I cared about the lyrics to a song, and actually felt them pull strings inside of me.
Though this is a review on the specific song “Vanity”, I do feel like I should talk a bit about the album (though expect a full review at some point in the future). The album ‘Vanity’ has a much different sound compared to previous effort ‘Until The Ink Runs Out’ from 2000, like the song “Vanity”, a number of the tracks on the album tinkered with the changing of tempo and replacing screams and thrashing with clear vocals and melody-driven strums. It ended up being a sigh of what to expect from next release ‘Obsession’ which was mostly the clearer vocals from James with his screams being toned way down.
The album flows, with the use of instrumental interludes “The Notes Of My Reflection” and “There Is Always” (an instrumental rendition of 1962’s controversial movie The Manchurian Candidate’s theme) a number of the songs actually run into each other without a break or stop. For the times that audio silence does take place in-between tracks, sampled movie quotes often lend a helping hand (something the band actually had started incorporating into their live shows around this time).
These uses of film excerpts help make the album feel like something much more than just another release; they make it feel like an epic happening.
Back to the track, it actually saw release in the form of a 7inch vinyl that was seen as a means of promotion for the upcoming album (it also featured what was originally supposed to be the big show-stealer of the record “I Don’t Mind” on the B-side). The vinyl was pressed on three colours and in different, limited numbers; 1000 on clear red, 1000 on white and 300 were pressed onto pink marbled vinyl.
All vinyl’s were released in a sleeve featuring the same artwork as the album (the first editions of the ‘Vanity’ album, the rereleased version used a similar but different image). This artwork was an image that embodied the feel of “Vanity” (both album and song); a lone bikini-clad woman reworked into different shades of pink. This woman, the woman that is sought after so much in the lyrics of the song, is beautiful and alluring, a modern-day temptress; this beauty, this sense of attraction and temptation is something this is obviously a main point of the song “Vanity”, but it also comes up many times during the entire album. This sense of vanity would actually go on to help create the term “fashioncore” and in-turn follow Eighteen Visions around until the day they called it quits in 2007.
The song “Vanity” isn’t talked about much these days, though to be honest it could be one of the most important tracks ever created, without it there wouldn’t be nearly as many hardcore bands as there are now. Would anyone have dared delve into the mix of clear vocals and screams? Who knows, but even if they did, would they have pulled it off as well as Eighteen did with this track; I don’t think so.
“Vanity” tells a tortured story in the form of a song, and for me personally this was something I had never experienced before, group that with the incredible instrumentals, the sound and the general feel of the song, this is something that I truly hold dear to myself.
"Vanity" was released on the album 'Vanity' and is available below for US readers via iTunes, and for those in the UK, an Amazon link is below as well. The CD, along with the 7" vinyl are also pretty easy to find, using Discogs and other record specialist sites.
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