Quadeca - Vanisher, Horizon Scraper (2025)
deus lhe pague - december 1, 2025
Who knew that the easiest way to get to me would be by sampling Chico Buarque. There are some albums that you only like for specific reasons, but you still love them all the same. Sometimes there is one single overruling factor that makes all the flaws step aside, even with those flaws being readily apparent. It’s a strange, contradictory state, but one that always ends up happening some way, somehow. Sometimes the flourishes are just so lovely, the textures so detailed, the world built by the sound itself is so immense that nothing else really matters… not even what the album itself wants you to notice. Vanisher, Horizon Scraper is a huge, lush, conflicting embodiment of such albums.
As is to be expected for Quadeca at this point, Vanisher sounds utterly divine. He took the exact right lessons from Buarque in that regard, because this is an absolute treat for the ears. Even besides the MPB-flavored truck right at the start of the album, this thing is gorgeous. Songs ebb and flow and swell gorgeously, like you’re watching the waves crest over the deck while stowed safely away inside your quarters. The album’s ventures into chamber and baroque pop are a stunning success, creating soundscapes so vast you can grab a lifesaver and float along its surface. It makes you want to be one of those massive, mythical sea creatures chilling in the middle of the ocean on an old world map between a compass rose and an analemma.
Truthfully, though, that luscious instrumentation is all that I can grab onto. I know this album’s concept, I know the short film made for it, and it simply goes right out the other ear. I feel weirdly bad that I neither really care for or consider the songwriting, and just let myself drift away on the waves of the soundscape. I don’t dislike it, and there are moments when it can really shine through (see “Forgone”), but it feels like Quadeca is trapped between songwriters that he really loves and hasn’t figured out how to syncretize them into his own voice just yet. You can really pick out specific things he adopted from collaborating with Kevin Abstract. Likewise, “Ruin My Life” starts off so much like “Romulus” by Sufjan Stevens that I accidentally zoned out and switched over to Michigan on one of my relistens. The lack of cohesion is this album’s great, big weak point… but that doesn’t impact how I feel about it all that much.
It’s strange, still enjoying an album but almost completely discarding the big reason it was intended to be enjoyed for. I can sense the grand ambition and the intended focus, and what it succeeds and fails at, but it’s not relevant to what makes this album really tick for me. It makes me feel like I’m Soulja Boy playing Braid, acknowledging and then gleefully discarding the intended point, just to make my own fun anyway. If Quadeca can refine his songwriting (or just pick a vibe and fully commit to it) and clean up the stitches on his song structures, he’s got something special in him. I can’t wait to see it.
Vanisher is the type of album that people not yet born will stumble across and wonder what the hell we were all thinking. This album will connect with them like a landmine to the chest. While its grandiose concepts simply wash over me, I see how they could completely sweep future listeners away like the riptide. I just know that I’ll be there with a copy of Construção and a few edibles, because I’d love to join them on their first journey.
magnetic north