For those just tuning into their programme, Vanity Mirror is the name under which the transnational musical duo of Canadian singer-songwriter-producer Brent Randall and Los Angeles-based drummer Johnny Toomey release music. Their debut record, Puff (2023), was a masterclass in lo-fidelity rock and roll, weaving together various strands of twentieth-century pop into a variegated sonic tapestry that is both rich in melancholic longing and radiant with technicolor exuberance.
The follow-up album, Super Fluff Forever, arrives over two years after the release of Puff. During that time, the band toured through Europe and California, while Randall split his time between Toronto and Monrovia, California, working on several albums in collaboration with his wife and honorary third member of Vanity Mirror, Madeline Doctor.
For the most part, Super Fluff Forever was entirely written, performed, recorded, and mixed by Randall in Toronto and Monrovia. True to his minimalist bedroom style, he used a laptop, three microphones, a few guitars, and an old piano found on Craigslist. Following the process established on their first album, Randall would send tunes through the wires of the internet over to Toomey’s Los Angeles basement, where he would lay down drums and send them back for mixdown. Additional vocals and piano overdubs were contributed by Doctor thereafter.
The band returns today with the double album two lead off singles, White Butterfly and Mr. Watchmaker.
Compared to Puff, Super Fluff Forever explores new stylistic terrain. The album plays like a cabinet of bedroom pop curiosities, filled with sonic signifiers that point in many directions: ringing six-string power chords, Echoplex-treated flute pirouettes, effervescent vocal harmonies, sepia-toned parlor piano rags, blurry Casio synthesizer mirages, fuzztone melodies, and wistful jangle-pop arpeggios. Unlike the ornate baroque arrangements of Randall’s earlier work with the Pinecones, or the kaleidoscopic sunshine pop of his and Toomey’s other band, Electric Looking Glass, these songs are tied together by a shared minimalism in both arrangement and production. There are sly winks and reverent nods to the past throughout, but taken as a whole, the album feels like it exists outside of time and space.
From the Piccadilly Freakbeat sike-out of opener “White Butterfly,” to the snarking, jittery power pop of “Jack of All Trades,” and the Blue Album-style surf wax fuzz of “I Don’t Wanna Hold Your Hand,” Randall utilizes the aesthetics of the past as the raw material with which he builds out a masterful expression of total pop mastery that summons the spirit, moods and surfaces of the myriad threads of post ’64 rock and roll.
Elsewhere on the album, the band paints in softer colors. On the hazy, Nilsson-esque “Painted Blue,” the warped Casio synth ballad “Plastic Heart,” and the wistful single “Apple Tree,” Randall shows a gentler side. “Apple Tree” in particular stands out as an instant Randall classic—the kind of pastel-hued,piano-led stroller that belongs on the top shelf beside the most lovelorn songs by Sir Paul or Emitt Rhodes.
Super Fluff Forever is out October 24 on vinyl, CD, and digitally via We Are Busy Bodies & Having Fun Records.