The West, to cite the Lizard King, is the very best. Within the years since Jim Morrison dedicated that little bit of boosterism to wax, the synecdoche between just a few hundred miles of California coast and our entire hegemonic civilization has solely change into extra darkly concerned. Fortunately, this identical ballyhooed advanced of vitality, spectacle, and violence gives a useful template for processing ongoing developments on its political, aesthetic, and psychic frontiers: aptly, the Western.
Vertigo, Wand’s sixth studio album, is undoubtedly a Western—albeit within the up to date type. Just like the cinematic interpretations by Monte Hellman and Jim Jarmusch, it’s a meditation on interior frontiers, the place borders constrict, identities shift, and maps go clean. As soon as upon a time, the Los Angeles quartet excelled at music match for touring Mulholland Drive on analysis chemical compounds. Vertigo, against this, beats its vagabond retreat to the desert—to a Llano del Rio or Spahn Ranch of the thoughts. Its pleasures, consequently, are furtive and oblique, scattering like reptiles from an overturned stone.
On the coronary heart of Vertigo is just not a story a lot as fugitive guideposts via life’s fractured last cycle. From out of a haze of electrical guitar texture, opener “Hangman” shuffles the mandala mid-tempo that may maintain a lot of the album. Frontman Cory Hanson’s voice is somber, shell-shocked; the story a sketch with out fastened topic or object. “Any person’s making an attempt to vanish/I assume I’ll discover out/I’m gonna see you right here tomorrow/I’m gonna be unnoticed…” A dream earlier than dying or the reminiscence of a blackboard guessing sport? The hangman carries out his sentence, however he additionally eases us on our approach. On this sludgy fever’s subsidence, prolonged coda “Curtain Name” suggests a soul’s ascent, its vacation spot nonetheless unsure.
Vertigo, too, emerges from a second of uncertainty for the band. A four-year recording hiatus noticed the departures of keyboardist Sofia Arreguin and founding bassist Lee Landey. Hanson, within the meantime, notched two formidable solo albums (recorded with assist from Wand guitarist Robbie Cody and new bassist Evan Backer) whose energetic mix of people, energy pop, and progressive rock threatened intermittently to eclipse the primary occasion. Ever resilient, Wand have carefully retooled their sound, crafting songs that appear excavated as a substitute from the type of cosmic post-rock improvisations first teased on 2022’s stay album Spiders within the Rain. The result’s a second debut of types, an act of self-definition in adverse, directly a settling in and a shearing away.
Gone is their previous materials’s giddy, lysergic bounce; as a substitute, drummer Evan Burrows pours a spacious, continuous basis the place melodies rise via repetition, and wealthy particulars (with string and wind preparations courtesy of Backer) slither and swim. The members of Wand would in all probability be first to acknowledge that that is formidable stuff—one thing akin to the tabula rasa of Pygmalion or Spirit of Eden, a complete of metamorphic elements—and thus not with out pitfalls. The glistening, incantatory again half of “JJ” should nonetheless overcome a considerably muddled takeoff. Elsewhere, atmospheres can linger indistinctly; at size, you come to overlook Hanson’s mischievous persona and the outdated band’s monster-movie licks.
