Unbecoming is Vyva Melinkolya’s Haunting Triumph

Vyva Melinkolya—the project of Pittsburgh-via-Louisville multi-instrumentalist and singer/songwriter Angel Diaz—hasn’t put out a solo LP of original music since her self-titled debut in 2018. However, she did team up with Madeline Johnston of Midwife to put out the collaborative LP Orbweaving, and it remains an intimate exploration of melancholia and dense, close-knit chemistry. On her own, though, Diaz’s Vyva Melinkolya guise is a massive, surreal and kindred examination of memories, moods and human closeness. If Tumblr had been around when the distortion pedal was discovered, then you’d have Unbecoming. The entire LP feels particularly moody, but in a captivating, effortless and nocturnal way. Diaz’s vocals pierce through the walls of every track with crumbling, drowsy purpose and there’s a deliberate, confident mark of language running throughout.

Album opener “Song About Staying” is the spiritual foil to Carissa’s Weird’s Songs About Leaving, as Diaz lulls us into the project with a surreal amount of plainspoken lyricism and vocal nakedness. Considering how vivid and impenetrable the instrumentation becomes later on the LP, “Song About Staying” dares every listener to buy into what’s to come. “Leaving isn’t easy, staying’s twice the harm,” Diaz muses. “Everyone is begging me, why does it go so far?” Likewise, “I65” is a miraculous pivot that features audio clips of skateboarding at the jump. It arrives like the proper introduction to what Unbecoming is meant to be. “To the world, I’m a snake, but to you I’m just your dog,” Diaz sings. “God, why did you make me tall? Wanna be small, nothing at all?” The guitars are particularly heavy here, sagging beneath the submerged-in-water vocals like sludge dripping off the carcass of a dead animal.

“Stars Don’t Fall” is a real gem on the tracklist, as Diaz’s voice goes to places only poets can reach. It trickles on at a snail’s pace—and that’s a good thing. The work is immune to being rushed, as she, again, makes a nod to another artist—this time, it’s Duster’s “Stars Will Fall.” “Stars Don’t Fall,” on the other hand, is dense and defined, as the opening guitar riff is barely a riff at all, instead trudging forward on bruised momentum and liquid grief. “Bright colors, wear them for you,” Diaz sings. “Bright colors, and that dress you want. Wasting every wish on you, and dye my dresses black to blue. I wish you knew my flesh, then we’d be so happy. I’d make you fucking happy.” At the track’s coda, Ethel Cain’s sister DeeDee and a mutual friend Mara conduct a spoken-word performance.

Johnston returns on the raw, pensive “Doomer GF Song,” as they and Diaz sing about the push and pull between hating the rigors of a social world yet being unable to escape its clutches. “Will we make it to Heaven, will we make it to 27?” they intone, in a breakdown lit only by the teeth of the track’s sonics, which are devastatingly cluttered with noise and massively relentless. Listening to Unbecoming is like having 50 wet T-shirts placed on top of your chest—it grabs hold of you and tightens the grip with every passing note, with every pronounced and prolonged verse. “Whimper” feels like a bright(ish) checkpoint on the album, as Diaz’s voice is clearer than ever and not quite drowned out by the instruments she surrounds herself with. “Spending all your time, boulder in the tide,” she sings. “I’d waste my whole life to be a spectral bride.” The ruminations on destiny and matrimony are trenchant, the melody caustically gruesome even in its most sublime moments. This is the part of Unbecoming where it sounds like Diaz might take a dream pop turn, but even the sweetest chords are doused in gasoline.

With Texas keyboardist—and former vocalist of Them Are Us Too—SRSQ on the slab during “Bruise,” it’s where every piece of shoegaze worship comes to a soaring apex on the album. There’s as much My Bloody Valentine influence as there is Grouper-style tranquility. Even as SRSQ and Diaz harmonize and flirt with angelic octaves, the intimate tapestry of their paired voices becomes corroded with head-splitting guitar drones. And you can even hear SRSQ belt out a Dolores O’Riordan-like wail at the track’s end. It’s a living, breathing marvel of immense, surrendering chaos. It’s the little things, like a bottom line of coiling and cursive soloing or an aching atmosphere of subdued synthesizers, that keep Unbecoming from caving in on itself, and those fine-tuned details are a 59-minute treasure trove.

“222” features harmonies from Ethel Cain and it’s the most buoyant part of the entire record—nearly to the point where it feels like the guitar instrumentation might morph into a dance track. But, alas, it never gets there, and that’s okay. There are sly marks of joy that leave quicker than they arrived, and it’s those small flickers that give the track its strength. It’s here where Unbecoming sounds most like an ecosystem beyond six strings. Beneath the axes, there’s a real bevy of undefinable sounds and patterns that, combined with Cain’s larger-than-life backing vocals, fills out the song and serves as a perfect back-end triumph on the tracklist. Similarly, closing track “Safe” is a proper, dazzling finale. At over six minutes, it’s colorful and splats onto your heart like a ton of bricks being dropped off a ledge. It’s a 3/4-time kaleidoscope of memory, distortion and sky-high electronica that compliments “Song About Staying,” bookends the album and strips it of any desire to get up and say goodbye.

There are shoegaze elements all throughout Unbecoming, but I’m hesitant to label Vyva Melinkolya a “shoegaze project”—namely because the energy here doesn’t suggest that Angel Diaz has her eyes locked onto her feet. No, this record transmits an aura that radiates grandiosity even at its slowest moments—as if Vyva Melinkolya is an entity that demands to be seen, not something that slips into the cog of the music’s machine. Perhaps that is the greatest trick that Unbecoming pulls off: It’ll force you to abandon all preconceptions and it’ll haunt your conclusions. The songs are gauzy, their fuzz swelling into an hour of sluggish, swampy guitars and spectral, divine singing that’ll swallow you whole.

Matt Mitchell reports as Paste‘s music editor from their home in Columbus, Ohio.