Wand : Vertigo
A fun game, for the willing: try to find the dividing line between psych rock and progressive rock, the precise moment one stops being the other. Wand, once more a quartet having shaved a member off their lineup from the Plum to Laughing Matter days, have always been keen to ride this line, twisting this way and that. Their debut Ganglion Reef for instance carries the image of a fantasy map in the gatefold, while the tracks on that record seem to segue one into the other much like the great psych/proto-prog records of the late ’60s, presaging a thing that had yet to become.
As they matured, Wand seemed to deepen their fascination with heavy metal and the more starry-eyed and acid-drenched wings of psychedelia, releasing the impeccable Golem followed shortly by the scattered and aimless 1,000 Days. What followed after was a fascinating reboot; retooling the lineup, a trick Wand seems to love to do to breathe new life into their work, they dropped Plum, which I reviewed some years back, agog as I was at how suddenly and firmly they had come to so closely resemble Radiohead. Was I coy in saying it so directly then? Apparently so, but the years and records that followed only reinforced that comparison, one that felt more comfortable as Radiohead faded uncomfortably into the past tense, never announcing a breakup but feeling like they will never reunite again.
This is not, to be clear, a knock. It felt in those days like Wand was exploring the prog/psych landscape, having plumbed (ha!) the depths of the more abstract, Barrett-inflected woozy world of the ’60s version of that sound for the suddenly post-punk and art rock informed sonics of Radiohead’s mostly keenly song-oriented period. Being influenced by Radiohead is, frankly, akin to being influenced by the Beatles or Black Sabbath, one of those groups that entire genres are built around, and using that more song-driven template certainly saw a massive leap in the pure songwriting chops of Wand as an ensemble, no longer relying on the force of timbre and the surreality of strange chord progressions and epics-in-minutes changes in arrangement. It was, to make it brief, a place of comfortably superlative songwriting that they could have stayed in for a long, long time, built a career out of it—like the way Bob Mould found himself as a songwriter in the later years of Hüsker Dü—and never, ever looked back.
Could have. For Vertigo, their first album five years if you don’t count their kick ass live record Spiders in the Rain from two years ago, they perform an act of strange alchemy. It seems as if the band is torn in two, caught in a time warp, fingers gripping the table legs through the aperture dinosaur snapping at their ankles. One half of the band is continuing the songwriting verve that drove their reinvention years of Plum to Laughing Matter while the other seems inexplicably to have arrived from the time they were writing Golem, the flecks of prog and psych and heavy rock and even touches of metal still twitching at the fingertips. What if Radiohead never got rid of that gnarly guitar on “Creep” that famously started half as a joke? What if King Buzzo joined the group, or perhaps the guitarist of Earthless? It’s an evolution through backwards motion, violating the haunting sense that perhaps Wand was best thought of as two separate bands simply sharing a name and some members. Suddenly, the arc of development of the group comes clear: those same sharpened songs they have been working so diligently toward are enjoined by a frankly fucking sick approach to the guitar, playing around but not over, lurching in a dissociative haze like a zombie while the suddenly swinging rhythm section lays into some solid warm grooves.
The vocal affect and harmonic language here certainly ramps up the Radiohead references, whether intentionally or not. Hell, even the cover feels almost like a nod to A Moon-Shaped Pool, the somehow-underrated (for now) closing record of Radiohead’s career, if not to Crack-Up by Fleet Foxes, another prog-informed jazzy rock record that showed spontaneous maturity. Suddenly, however, the overlay of their blown out early psych-rock sound, reconnecting with those roots, gives the proceedings here a sense of ownership.
On certain past tracks of the previous few records, it seemed as if Yorke, Greenwood and company could certainly have penned them, if perhaps thinking through the lens of Robert Fripp. Here? This is all Wand, a collection of woozy psychedelia laid against art rock, giving a sense of swing and groove that undercuts what perhaps before was becoming a too-straight approach to indie rock. Being completely original, while a neat trick, is never more important than writing good songs and playing well. Here, Wand marries the latter to a classically winning combo of an almost amateurish and punky sense of the psychedelic against the measured maturity of a great rhythm section and clear harmonic movement. It’s a magician’s trick, virtuosity here obscuring its simplicity, a noodling and unstructured guitar here obfuscating its deliberate arrangement function as spontaneous interest and color. Those years learning how to make more sophisticated arrangements, to work the knobs and faders to make everything feel cinematic even if it’s a simple pop song, deliver the goods.
Label: Drag City
Year: 2024
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Wand : Vertigo
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