All My CDs, pt. 114: Aims

Aims - Vienna Teng

This album came out just after I started training for my first marathon, and like every other album I discovered during that time, my first experience of it was during a run. This artist, whose previous work consisted of a mix of fast and slow music tending toward ponderous and pensive themes and intellectual depth rather than the kind of simple upbeat sounds that are normally ideal for exercise, miraculously came out with an album of perfect long-distance running music just in time. There are a few slow songs, yes, but only just enough to provide a break from the constant bass-thumping that encourages speed and to remind me to pace myself for the long haul. And one of the slow ones, Breaking Light, manages to be both encouraging and relaxing, and joins the very short list of slow songs that I nevertheless like running to.

Aims did another thing too: proved that Inland Territory was not the sort of lightning that only strikes once, but marked a genuine shift in Vienna Teng’s musical style and quality, a shift that I like even as I still deeply appreciate her earlier work. It’s similar to Inland Territory in its open-minded experimenting with lots of different styles, and yoking genres with themes in ways that suggest some meaning to be explored. But the themes themselves are different. As the title suggests, I suspect that this album is about humanity’s various personal and collective goals, and our efforts to acheive them. (Yet another appropriate characteristic of running music.)

Some songs serve as precisely aimed political and social commentary, such as In the 99, which explores economic inequality in the language of the then-recent Occupy movement. There’s also the more subtle Hymn of Axciom, which borrows the aesthetics of religious chanting to deliver a chilling message about the pseudo-spiritual relationship we’ve developed with marketing algorithms.

But most of the album is more focused on personal and interpersonal subject matter. Things like love, determination, healing, family, and home. Not that these songs are any less grand in scale than the ones that address political themes. Landsailor uses imagery that suggests doing the impossible in a vaguely spiritual way, while Level Up is one of the most awe-inspiring “encouragement” songs I’ve ever heard (and the video is pretty awesome too).

And with this I must bid adeu to Vienna Teng and move on to someone much less familiar to me.

Next: Fear