I WAS THE LONER OF PARADISE VALLEY

With I Was the Loner of Paradise Valley Vylet Pony has evolved out of her happy-go-lucky EDM frivolity returning to more "serious" layered and sophisticated song construction with heavier, more adult lyrical content. I, for one, am greatly relieved as this immensely talented artist had expressed a kind of deeply introspective "diary" approach to her musical expressiveness when, at age 18 & 19, she was going through some really heavy, rough times. By throwing herself deeply into her My Little Pony universe, she was able to, for a time, deflect her self-discovery in favor of some fun and good times--which was expressed with the monstrously long albums of Super Pony World: Fairytales, CUTIEMARKS (And the Things that Bind Us), can opener's notebook: fish whisperer, and Carousel (An Examination of The Shadow, Creekflow, and its Life as an Afterthough). It was with this latter February 2023 release that I feel I began to see glimmers of more serious musicianship and composition (with its many borrowed riffs and motifs from the domain of Classical music an the confident in-your-face swag of 1990s Janet Jackson), but this new album finds Vy buckling down and really producing high-quality compositions rendered with the same attention to detail and engineering acumen she was expressing back in 2017. In short, it feels like Zelda Trixie Lulamoon is choosing human life: at age 24 she's showing signs of growing up! (My experience as a parent/uncle, etc. is that Gen Z is taking its time choosing adulthood--defiantly daring the world to "coerce" it to participate in the world that "we" (the previous generations) created and that they've been "forced" to negotiate. I know not what the world will look like as these young adults take on independence, jobs, relationships, parenthood, homeownership, and control (or, better, responsibility for) of their lives. I'm sure it will be interesting. Perhaps the successful takeover of the Trumpian distortion of reality will satisfy and replace their own dystopian view of the world: then they can continue to live in a perpetual state of alternate reality!

My aim with this review, however, was to celebrate the return of Vylet Pony, the artist, to the creative and innovative music-making that made me think she was headed for an entry into the world of progressive rock that she once thought was her destiny. (Will 2024's Monarch of Monsters signify the fulfillment of and commitment to that destiny?)