Some songs murmur their truths. Michael Vettraino’s “Ring Open” gets them to fly in Technicolor.
Issued as the last single from his debut EP, “Ring Open” is a genre-bending intent, tying together the emotional strands of the project into one final, sweeping crescendo. But don’t get it twisted. This is far from a tidy little bow this track doesn’t tie it all together so much as it blows things wide open.
Keeping with Vettraino’s maximalist approach, “Ring Open” is constructed on a disorienting, dazzling base. This results in a stream-of-consciousness symphony that transforms the artist’s stream-of-consciousness inner monologue into a wall of sound. It’s a brash testament to the EP’s more-is-more ethos, but it couldn’t feel further from overstuffed. Instead, it pulses with purpose and electricity, each stacked vocal one of the threads of the larger emotion-stained garment. One feels drawn in immediately to the music voices that rise and fall in waves, forming unlikely harmonies that feel dissonant and soothing. The effect is a dream, like the listener’s been invited into Vettraino’s head just as things grow clear amid the chaos.
“Ring Open” is not just the closing act, it’s the reveal. Where preceding tracks set the stage, this song shifts the lens, resituating everything that came before it with a new perspective and unflinching openness. There’s this sense that Vettraino, having worked his way through all the noise of identity, creation, and expression, has finally come to something that feels honest, and he’s flinging the door wide open for listeners to experience it too.
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