Wye Oak - The Louder I Call, The Faster It Runs (2018)

Wye Oak’s 2011 album Civilian was a major inflection point for the band. Supporting the record brought the Baltimore duo of Andy Stack and Jenn Wasner across oceans, onto “The Tonight Show,” and into the arsenal of Hollywood music supervisors. By the end of the year, after wringing every possible variation out of their setlist, they were spent. “I feel like our band is going to change very, very drastically from here on out in order to remain vital to us,” Wasner noted in an interview with the Village Voice. And so they did, situationally and stylistically. Stack moved to the artistic enclave of Marfa, Texas, and then on to Portland, Oregon. At the same time, Wasner set her guitar aside as she worked on her throwback chirp-pop project Dungeonesse; the results were sufficiently freeing that Wye Oak’s 2014 follow-up, Shriek, eschewed the six-string almost entirely.

This is a standard narrative: a band that has to evolve or die. But more than that, it’s the story of trying to maintain relationships as adulthood scatters everyone to the winds. In order to make Shriek, Stack and Wasner passed demos back and forth. This time, they opted for a series of home/away dates, alternating weeks recording in Marfa (to which Stack returned after Shriek) and Durham, North Carolina (Wasner’s home since 2015). The strategy forced more direct collaboration, as well as a spirit of first-thought-best-thought. The result is The Louder I Call, the Faster It Runs, which, for all its weight, has the particular giddiness of conspirators reuniting.

Pound for pound, The Louder I Call is Wye Oak’s brightest, most straightforward effort. Like the best of 2016’s retooled outtakes set, Tween, it fuses the dream pop of the band’s middle period to galvanic backbeats. On a number of tracks, synth ostinatos provide the connective tissue between Stack’s machine-tooled timekeeping and Wasner’s array of guitar daubs and squalls. The duo is urgent yet unhurried. On the pan-happy “Say Hello,” Wasner’s higher register—a doodle of strange skywriting over the buzz—recalls Cocteau Twins’ Liz Fraser. “Five hundred aerial miles to go,” she sings before dipping some desperately gorgeous howls into the serration of her guitar. On “It Was Not Natural,” the popping bassline—the foundation of so much of Shriek—returns the band to earth. Wasner takes a walk, overturns a strange object with her foot. “It was not natural/All along,” she decides over synth twinkle and piano thud, “Only human hands/Could give us/Something so unforgiving.”

Track List:
01. (Tuning)
02. The Instrument
03. The Louder I Call, The Faster It Runs
04. Lifer
05. It Was Not Natural
06. Symmetry
07. My Signal
08. Say Hello
09. Over And Over
10. You Of All People
11. Join
12. I Know It’s Real

Jenn Wasner: vocals, guitar, bass, piano, keyboards, programming
Andy Stack: drums, guitar, bass, programming, keyboards, piano, upright bass

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