Kleenex Girl Wonder's Vana Mundi 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 Graham Smith's career, and it feels absolutely necessary that everyone hear it.
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, 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 goddamned 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. And so Vana Mundi ends up tracing a journey, from a frustrated cynic trapped by their own psychic ice/isolation to someone reaching out to offer understanding and something not unlike love for their fellow humans. For maybe the first time in his long career, Smith is more interested in helping the 'you' in his songs than scoring points off them.Videos