Fresh off an international tour, synth-pop act Parallels and producer SLACKMACHINE bring you something glorious to inject some kinesis into your Thanksgiving weekend. If you don’t celebrate Thanksgiving, no worries. This SLACKMACHINE remix of Parallels’ “Hand With Care” will still propel your body to move with its deft reinterpretation of one of the best songs off Parallels’ most-recent album, SUPERSYMMETRY. It releases Friday, but Vehlinggo is giving you a head start. Dive in and be free. Long Beach, California-based synthwave/Italo Disco/techno/Hi-NRG artist SLACKMACHINE (AKA Brad A. Kinnan ..read more

I’m sitting at my desk, writing this piece wearing a Vehlinggo sweatshirt and drinking coffee from a Vehlinggo mug, looking out at some sturdy pines as they wave in the wind. There is a give and take between the Hudson River and the Catskill Mountains when it comes to weather, and we’re all left trying to navigate it. We have so many such Vehlinggo logo mugs of various sizes and designs in our house that we don’t even notice them anymore, but the one I drink from is special. My wife, Allison, had it made for me for the site’s first anniversary in November 2015 — this was back when the view fro ..read more

(Editor’s Note: This is the second of two pieces published today about Vehlinggo’s ninth anniversary. The other is this personal essay.) Vehlinggo, this site you’re reading, published its first article nine years ago today. (More specifically, I wrote a review of College’s Save The Day EP and published it on Nov. 19, 2014.) At the time I had no idea what the next many years would look like. It was just a chance for me to cover music I loved — largely but not entirely stemming from the Drive soundtrack extended family. Although over the years I’ve focused more and more on scores and soundtracks ..read more

Immortal Girlfriend are one of the coolest synthwave-adjacent rock bands/score composers out there. They are impeccable musicians and songwriters, who put on live shows that highlight and expand the force of their songs. On that note, today Vehlinggo premieres the Eric Peckham-directed live video for the Milwaukee, Wisconsin-based duo’s excellent “Moment,” showcasing the siblings’ captivating work with drummer Brian Dendy. It doesn’t stop at the music, though. Check out the set design, featuring a memorable cameo. After the video, dive into the quick Q&A with the band. (You can also get t ..read more

Ida No spent more than 20 years as the frontwoman of Glass Candy, that influential noise-then-disco duo that ushered in a new wave of colorful musical expression before disappearing into the stardust from whence they came. Even so, No hasn’t been idle. For nearly two years, she and husband Nat Walker (formerly of Glass Candy labelmates Chromatics, Desire, and Symmetry) have been releasing engaging numbers as the more guitar-forward Fawn, a project that’s brimful of elements of shoegaze, psychedelia, trip-hop, and even a sprinkle of trap, with some utterly danceable components tossed in for goo ..read more

Michael C. Hall’s synth-pop band Princess Goes has a delectable new album entitled Come of Age coming out tomorrow, and to celebrate Vehlinggo is giving you a taste of the album with an exclusive premiere of the transcendent title track and its visualizer. “Come of Age” is part of an album that reflects perhaps the most accessible body of work the trio have released thus far. Hall (Dexter, Six Feet Under, Hedwig and the Angry Inch) is a natural frontman but keyboardist Matt Katz-Bohen (Blondie, Cyndi Lauper) and drummer Peter Yanowitz (The Wallflowers, Morningwood) provide a strong and captiva ..read more

Adam Miller’s post-Chromatics career kicked off with the exquisitely meditative Gateway instrumental album, and today he announces he’s following it up with a five-cut EP coming out Nov. 10 that heavily features his natural voice and some profoundly catchy arrangements. Along with the news, he’s released two killer singles from the EP: the masterpiece title cut and a darkly captivating cover of The Byrds’ “Everybody’s Been Burned.” Both feature former The Cure member Lol Tolhurst on drums. The two singles in some ways represent a release some might have expected from Miller first in the wake o ..read more

Synthwave (and often synthwave-adjacent) artist Makeup and Vanity Set’s new album, FM, arrives as the genre creeps ever closer to its 20th year. It’s been around so long and changed so much that the genre born of nostalgic tendencies is now in a position to make a listener nostalgic for nostalgia. This is exactly what FM does. FM, which comes about six months after MAVS and Sferro released their datawave-blasted Wavefinder LP, is a striking record in the sense that it just might be one of MAVS’s most classic synthwave-sounding collections. Even when he was releasing albums like the ever popula ..read more

Nat Walker is a multi-instrumentalist, known predominantly for drumming for the disbanded Chromatics, in addition to contributing various parts to that group’s erstwhile labelmates Desire and Symmetry. It’s been two years since Walker, Adam Miller, and Ruth Radelet announced the end of Chromatics and left the Italians Do It Better fold generally. And since that time, the LA-based Walker’s been busy with a few new chapters in his musical career. His latest release, the instrumental Physical Culture, released a few weeks ago, showcases one lane of his strengths: Extracting big emotion, a broad c ..read more

Over my summer break I had a lot of time to think and I’ve decided to shift the nature of Vehlinggo a bit. Impermanence and such. This affects the publishing schedule and medium (switching to online and print) and also means the end of The Vehlinggo Podcast. Worry not, my friends. I’ll elaborate below. I published the first Vehlinggo post close to nine years ago, in November 2014. (That seems like 30 years ago at this point.) After a couple decades of using the Vehlinggo name for other things, I got serious and developed an online music publication — this one! — that showcased a blend of unkno ..read more