The West, to quote the Lizard King, is the best. In the years since Jim Morrison committed this bit of waxing, the synecdoche between a few hundred miles of California coast and our entire hegemonic civilization has grown murkier. Fortunately, this same compact complex of energy, spectacle, and violence offers a handy template for processing ongoing developments at its political, aesthetic, and psychic frontier: aptly, the West.
Vertigo, Wand's sixth studio album, is undeniably a western—albeit in a contemporary style. Like the cinematic interpretations of Monte Hellman and Jim Jarmusch, it is a meditation on internal borders, where borders shrink, identities shift and maps become blank. Once upon a time, the Los Angeles quartet excelled in music fit for a Mulholland Drive tour of research chemicals. Vertigo, instead, transcends his vagabond desert retreat — to a Llano del Rio or Spahn Ranch of the mind. His pleasures, therefore, are hidden and indirect, spreading like reptiles from an overturned stone.
In his heart Vertigo it is not a narrative so much as fugitive guides through the broken final cycle of life. Through a mist of electric guitar texture, opener “Hangman” shuffles the mandala mid-tempo that will sustain much of the album. Frontman Cory Hanson's voice is grim, shocked. the fairy tale a sketch without fixed subject or object. “Someone's trying to disappear/I guess I'll find out/I'll see you here tomorrow/I'll stay out…” A dream before I die or the memory of a board guessing game? The executioner carries out his sentence, but he also eases us on our way. In this sediment of muddy fever, the extended coda 'Curtain Call' suggests the ascent of a soul, its destination still uncertain.
VertigoIt also emerges from a moment of uncertainty for the band. A four-year recording hiatus led to the departure of keyboardist Sofia Arreguin and founding bassist Lee Landey. Hanson, meanwhile, scored two stunning solo albums (recorded with the help of Wand guitarist Robbie Cody and new bassist Evan Backer), whose energetic mix of folk, power pop and progressive rock occasionally threatened to overshadow the main event. Ever resilient, Wand have dutifully retooled their sound, creating songs that seem excavated from the kind of cosmic post-rock improvisations they pioneered on their live album 2022 Spiders in the rain. The result is a second kind of debut, an act of negative self-definition, at once an arrangement and a removal.
Gone is the giddy, lysergic bounce of their past material. Instead, drummer Evan Burrows pours a spacious, continuous base where melodies emerge through repetition and rich details (with strings and brass courtesy of Backer) slip and swim. Wand members would probably be the first to recognize that this is ambitious stuff – something akin to his tabula rasa Pygmalion the Spirit of Eden, a set of transformed parts—and therefore not without its pitfalls. The sparkling, spontaneous back half of “JJ” has to overcome a somewhat confused takeoff. Elsewhere, atmospheres may remain indistinct. Ultimately, you miss Hanson's mischievous persona and the old monster band licks.
