Hi, everyone. Misthony Fittano here, the Internet's busiest music nerd. It's time for a review of this new Clarence Clarity album, VANISHING ACT II: ULTIMATE REALITY.

Here we have a brand new LP from singer, songwriter, producer extraordinaire, Mr. Clarence Clarity, a UK artist who broke in the underground in the middle of the 2010s with the fantastic album, No Now, a truly special debut that was an odd, glitchy, sometimes nightmarish take on oughties pop music. Think like Nsync by way of Michael Jackson, but warped in such a way to where it's like a surrealist painting.

This record is massive, it's dense, and it's almost 10 years old, and despite that, there's really not a lot out there like it, even with a Y2K era pop seeing a very strong resurgence right now.

But Clarence Clarity is not just some revivalist pop act. He is part pop artist, pop avant-gardist, making music that appeals in a way that is simultaneously subversive but also accessible is a very tough balancing act to execute. It's one that I would argue that even Clarence himself hasn't always done well, or maybe he hasn't really been concerned with doing it well.

I mean, after No Now with his following album, Think: Peace, he definitely made an attempt to streamline and simplify his sound, and my feelings on that record are somewhat mixed. Clarence Clarence has also done a lot of production for other left field pop artists over the years, like Rina Sawayama, as well as Dorina Electra, especially on their most recent record, Fanfare, that dropped in 2023.

Clarence's solo output, though, in recent years has grown increasingly dodgy and difficult to track the progression of, be it with the Dead Screen Scrolls ambient album he put out or all of the You're Wrong mixtapes that have landed on his Bandcamp page recently. He's also released at least a few EPs, including VANISHING ACT I, which obviously this new album is the sequel to.

I feel like Clarence has given us all of these radical, random, and surprising drops, only to, on this new album here, end up in roughly the same place stylistically and aesthetically, but maybe in a diminished capacity. I think the opening track on this record encapsulates what I feel are some of the general shortcomings of this new album here, because for sure there is something to it. On this track, you do get Clarence Clarity's trademark strain of 2000s-era pop music with pretty rough, cluttered, and punchy production, as well as vocals that are dense and over the top, not to mention the dystopian lyrics as well as the vaguely exotic lead melodies that play throughout the song. The track features nearly everything that made so many highlights on Clarence's debut full-length album so good. But the end result still feels like a mix of stagnation with a bit of regression, too, as the production on the track generally doesn't feel quite as glitchy or as detailed as it has on past efforts. The vocals are fuzzed out and mangled to the point where they are pretty much unintelligible.

While Clarence's tracks have always featured at least a little bit of chaos, this record, at least at the start, just feels shoddy in comparison. I also think Clarence's song structures and writing on past works tended to be a lot more wild and out there and adventurous, which is especially clear when you dig into tracks like "To Be a Bat", "Old King, The World Moved On", as well as "Deepest Sea Regret", which originally landed on another project in a much more low-fi demo-type state, the Unrecorded History album, which if you look at Clarence Clarity's Bandcamp, it says it is not an album. It's not an album at all.

Confusing, I know.

But anyway, to my ears, by typical Clarence Clarity standards, these tracks just feel like formal pop hits, but delivered in such a way to where they feel like a demo that would be cleaned up or just formalized or commercialized later down the road. I would say this conventionality is pretty consistent throughout much of the album. One of the only real true surprises on the entire record has to be the freaky metal breakdown on "Playing Our Parts". But even that feels somewhat tame by general underground internet music standards these days.

Look, fon't get me wrong, I would handily take this record over just about any generic-ass, bland, plain pop album floating up into the mainstream today. I don't mean to undersell Clarence Clarity's creativity and talents and skills, generally. I just think he's made stronger material in the past – tracks with brighter mixes, more versatility, and a wider array of influences to pull from, as well as some clearer vocal performances, too.

With that being said, though, there are no tracks I took away from this album feeling as if they were complete trash. There are numerous highlights to note, like "ALLATONCENESS", which if you're an experimental pop artist, if you're going to write catchy or more direct songs, you might as well go all the way like he did here and give us one of the most lush and sing-along choruses of your entire career with some truly stellar vocal harmonies, too.

On "The Greatest Living Musician Found Dead", Clarence goes into full arena rock mode with a grandiose guitar backed bridge and another awesome hook. "julio so cute lowkey" is some beautifully warped low-key R&B, where Clarence actually gives us some pretty raw vocals in his lower range that are pretty compelling and refreshing given the inflections and the delivery he attacks most of these songs with.

Plus, this track segues really well into another favorite of mine, "Rage Quitting, Quietly", which is another rocker in the tracklist with some chugging guitars. I think this song encapsulates what I feel to be possibly the biggest selling point of the record, and that's the lyrics, which, ironically, are not quite as decipherable here as they have been on past Clarence Clarity records. But the more I listened to this album, the more apparent it became that many of these tracks were coming from a very dark, introspective, and sometimes angry place, whether Clarence on a given track is fed up with the behavior of a particular person or the state of the world. There are moments on this album where he even seems completely disillusioned with the act of making music music itself, or at least trying to make a career in music.

Now, he could be singing from some imagined or alternative perspective on many of these tracks. I'm certainly open to that argument, but I don't think these feelings are just coming out of nowhere. A lot of them seem to line up in a really consistent way, showing Clarence spiraling into, again, super negative feelings, a lot of frustration.

Even if I'm not as enamored with this album aesthetically and instrumentally as I am past Clarence Clarity efforts, the songwriting, for the most part, is still very much there. There is a seriously intense emotional potency, again, an anger to these tracks that is difficult to ignore. is really just right up in your face. There are moments where it gets to the point where I just have to wonder, is he okay? Is this man all right?

All of these feelings are interestingly matched up with a very serene closing track that is one of the most beautiful and stripped-back ballads I think Clarence has ever ended a project with. It really puts the album in a place where it finishes much stronger than it starts.

But yeah, overall, I had very high hopes for this album that weren't quite met, unfortunately. I didn't find this record to be as bold or as ambitious or as adventurous as some of my favorite projects from Clarence in the past. However, if the negative, tortured and crushing feelings that are fueling a lot of these songs are in fact real, I could imagine it being very difficult to achieve those sorts of things while still keeping your head down and focusing on your music. I am feeling a light 7 on this project.

Anthony Fantano. Clarence Clarity. Forever.