Laura Kerry
Lætitia Tamko moved from Cameroon to New York at age 13, and in the last few years she has moved from the engineering field to the Brooklyn indie music scene where she is known as Vagabon. It is a fitting title for one who wanders, in such a transitory state that she never even makes it to the final letter in the word on which she bases her name.
Contrary to her name, Vagabon is completely at home in her music. In her debut, Infinite Worlds, she has crafted eight beautiful songs that reveal a clear voice and vision. And most of that vision is very personal and raw, a feeling emphasized by the fact that Tamko plays most of the instruments on the album. She doesn’t shy away from stepping out from behind the music; beginning with quiet strumming on an electric guitar, her voice is unvarnished in the opener “The Embers” as she sings, “I feel so small / My feet can barely touch the floor.” Later, as the song builds to a booming rock chorus, she inserts her own name, singing, “Run and tell everybody that Lætitia is”—letting her identity trail off into an ellipse until the next line answers with, “A small fish.”
Smallness is a theme on an album that coalesces around narrative threads more than it does around genre or sound. Right after she declares she is just a small fish for the last time on “The Embers,” Vagabon starts the devastatingly pretty “Fear & Force” with, “I've been hiding in the smallest space.” The main throughline in the album, though, is home. Throughout Infinite Worlds, the artist sings of finding home, losing home, refusing to leave home. In the energetic “Minneapolis,” over a Smiths-like bass line, she sings, “I can't go back to the place where I once was / Old home, where I was born”; through a distorted guitar and pounding drum in “100 Years,” she vows, “If we sell this house / I won't go, no I won't go”; and in the delicate, acoustic “Alive and A Well,” she says she will “make a home that is my own.” “Cold Apartment” doesn’t explicitly mention home, but it ends in an image of her living space, representing the end of hope for a past relationship.
Within the personal touches and narrative skill in the album, though, there’s a strain of something stranger. It’s detectable in the melding of folk, synth pop, and rock; in the guttural flourishes in “The Embers”; and in the surprising electronic interlude, “Mal à L’Aise” (French for “ill at ease” or “uncomfortable”), which uses layers of vocal samples. For all its beauty, Infinite Worlds is a weird album—and it is all the better for it. As Vagabon continues to explore notions of home in music that is raw but not straightforward, we hope she sticks around for a long time.