Wye Oak - Civilian

I like to think of Wye Oak as comfortable middle children of indie rock (if ‘comfortable middle children’ can exist), surrounded on both sides by bands with far more to prove than they ever will. Despite being three full-lengths into their career, Jenn Wassner and Andy Stack have never found themselves thrust out into a bigger spotlight by a critical / commercial success, so they don’t face exterior pressure to one-up themselves. They’ve also never ridden the blog machine on the back of a hotly circulated mp3, etc., so there’s no ‘hype’ that they’re then obliged to live up to. Plenty of late-decade bands exist in this perennial no-man’s-land, but Wye Oak is one of the few that sound at home there, like the idea of twisting themselves into something more ‘relevant’ and attention-grabbing has never even occurred to them. I mean, they do know it’s 2011, right?

The funny thing is if you toned down the guitars they could be just a few glockenspiel plinks short of Etsy-pop (my new favorite condescending descriptor) car commercial soundtrack ubiquity. Wassner’s voice hits this admirable point between deep, grown-up expressiveness and velvety melodic prowess, while the duo’s most accessible moments, like those on 2007 debut If Children or last year’s My Neighbor / My Creator EP—a favorite here at PN—show a highly developed ear for songwriting and a knack for subtle arrangements. They also just finished a tour opening for, uh, The Decemberists (speaking of ‘Etsy-pop’…), so there’s that. Listening to Wye Oak, one often gets the sense that they’re a band always on the cusp of something bigger, but also willfully evasive of any opportunity they might have to ‘break through.’ If you’re wired a certain way, this makes them very likable.

Fortunately, Civilian finds Wye Oak not caring at all that I think they could have a nice career “putting a bird on it,” so to speak. The new album is of a piece with their lunging sophomore effort The Knot (2009) in that it likes to offset their folkier, friendlier aspects with the dark clouds of Wassner’s distortion pedal heroics and Stack’s detailed backing. Riffage is an important part of what makes this band work, though (so forgive me if I seemed to downplay it), and this record does indeed one-up its predecessor by proving that Wye Oak can unite all their impulses under one banner. Opener “Two Small Deaths” fades from crowd chatter to dreamy harmonics, but it’s propelled the whole way by Stack’s tireless rim clicks and Wassner’s arpeggiating, an introduction that refuses to announce the album’s arrival with any loud, crashing fare. “Holy Holy” is perpetually unstable, punctuating its unresolving verses with scratchy bent-string vamps until two thirds of the way through, when they stop everything and bust out this satisfyingly grungy chorus that gets ridden out to the end.

Throughout most of Civilian, Wye Oak sound intent on surprising the listener with noisy left turns, a gambit that doesn’t always pay off the way they want. “Plains” spends so much time dragging its feet through long verses that its loud, intermittent trills—shocking as they are—seem to exist simply for the sake of shock. “Dog Eyes” fares better, hopscotching between a peppy Modest Mouse shimmy and thunderous slo-mo downstrokes. Though its dusty desert atmosphere is appealing, “We Were Wealth” is functionally one big 5-minute crescendo and there are already too many of those in this world. Plus, it’s a prime example of Civilian’s main weakness: the fact that Wassner purposefully holds her (very capable!) voice back, singing through her cheeks and letting her guitars do the talking. It’s a shame because, when her words are legible, she comes off as an earnest skeptic trying to get a grip on identity and faith. “If you should doubt, my heart, remember this / that I would lie to you if I believed it was right to do,” she sings to herself on the album’s spare closer, her fingerpicked guitar filling the room around her. It’s heavy subject matter that fits with Wye Oak’s slowcore roots, however out of fashion they may be. That’s one of the saving graces of Civilian, though: like I said, this band never set out to be fashionable.