ARTISTICALLY RESTLESS
Wye Oak’s Wasner and Stack continue to follow their creative urges, writes
There are certainly tougher crosses to bear for an American indie band than having to endure the constant glow of acclaim from music critics.
These days, it would be tough to find an act that better embodies the term critically acclaimed than Baltimore-born duo Wye Oak. While the act’s output since releasing its guitar-fuelled indie rock debut, If Children, more than 10 years ago has been stylistically varied and challenging, it’s also been bright, tuneful and usually quite accessible.
Lately, they seem to have inspired deep-dive investigation from critics, who tend to pore over the shifting modus operandi of singer-guitarist Jenn Wasner and keyboard-drummer Andy Stack, their constantly evolving soundscapes and Wasner’s personal, if often enigmatic, lyrics.
On the line from her home in Durham, North Carolina, Wasner admits she reads reviews, albeit reluctantly. At the behest of the duo’s manager, she read Jon Pareles’ insightful, lengthy and borderline euphoric assessment of Wye Oak’s sixth studio album, The Louder I Call, The Faster It Runs, in April when it ran in the New York Times.
Wasner sheepishly refers to the review, which spends a good deal of time unravelling her lyrics, as “shockingly good.” But, grateful as she and Stack may be for the support, it’s also the sort of thing that can disrupt a band’s creativity if taken too seriously, she says.
“I think people believing the nice things that people say about them is one of the quickest paths to sucking really bad,” Wasner says. “It feels good. But, at the same time, that’s still just one person’s opinion. It feels great, don’t get me wrong, and it’s appreciated and super cool. But at the same time, if you put too much stock into anything like that, negative and positive, it just starts to warp your brain to a point where your reasons for creating start to move in directions outside of yourself. I just think that’s not really good for a creative person to do.”
Nevertheless, The Louder I Call, The Faster It Runs is a shockingly good album more than deserving of all the kudos and likely to land on year-end top 10 lists of astute critics everywhere.
It’s the proper followup to the duo’s game-changing 2014 album Shriek (2016’s Tween was a collection of revamped orphan songs that didn’t make it onto past albums), which showcased Wye Oak’s evolution from skilful inheritors of ’90s indie rock styles to something far more complex and genre-defying. The Louder I Call makes good on the promise of its predecessor, returning Wasner’s inventive guitar noise to the mix while keeping the bold propulsive beats, swirling and dense art-pop backing and searching lyrics.
Opening track The Instrument is a jittery electro-pop gem; My Signal places Wasner’s gorgeously melancholic torch-song vocals on top of the unsettling strains of a string quartet; Lifer and It Was Not Natural are both yearning and meticulously built, showcasing their studio wizardry.
Wasner says Shriek was an attempt to throw a wrench into how the duo operates, or “invert” what the two had traditionally been responsible for in their music. So she put down the guitar and switched to bass, while Stack, who had generally provided the bottom end on keyboards, became responsible for the higher-register sounds. It was a synth-based record that pushed Wye Oak into new sonic territory.
But when it came to recording The Louder I Call, Wasner says she and Stack felt confident enough to not place any experiments or limitations on their approach.
“After about 10 years of being a band, we’ve gotten a lot better at everything we do and we got to a point where we thought maybe with this record we don’t need to give ourselves that limitation, maybe we just make the most maximal record we want to make and not instil any sort of rules or guidelines for how we want it to turn out and see what happens. And that’s the sort of thing I don’t think we could have accomplished, or even come anywhere near accomplishing, 10 years ago when we started. Because this whole time making records has been a learning process.”
Part of that was through necessity. For the past five years or so, Stack and Wasner have lived in separate cities. She was in Durham, while Stack was in Marfa, Texas. It was a long-distance relationship that had the two sending song scraps and experiments to each other, figuring out studio craft as they went. You would be hard-pressed to find any press on the band that doesn’t bring up this unique working relationship.
Ironically, a few weeks before The Louder I Call dropped, Stack decided to move to Durham. So the two are now “quite literally nextdoor neighbours,” Wasner says with a laugh. She has known Stack since they were kids in Baltimore. While the two were reportedly a romantic item years ago, Wasner says her relationship with her musical partner now has “brothersister” overtones.
“We can also complete each other’s musical sentences in a way,” she says.
Living in the same city isn’t likely to change things. Both musicians moonlight with other projects — Wasner with her solo work under the name Flock of Dimes, while Stack has toured with The National’s Matt Berninger’s side project EL Vy, among others — and both see their solitary time in home studios as key to how the band works.
“It’s just about taking the time for yourself to work and finesse your ideas,” Wasner says. “Both of us use the studio as a writing tool. Whether I’m emailing him tracks that I’ve worked on alone in my studio from across the street or across 2,000 miles, the process is basically the same.”
The band’s live shows have always been a novel spectacle with the musicians performing everything as a duo, with Stack employing an octopus-like one-man-band approach by playing drums with one hand and keyboard-bass and samples with the other.
But, for the first time, Wye Oak has abandoned this two-againstthe-world dynamic. For its most recent tour, which brings them to Central United Church for their Calgary debut June 21 as part of Sled Island, Wasner and Stack will be accompanied by a bass player.
“We always enjoyed playing as a duo, but always said if it ever stops feeling like a positive limitation that is inspiring and starts feeling like one that is limiting, there’s no reason why we can’t switch it up,” Wasner says.
“We got to the point where we felt like it would be much more exciting for us creatively and much better for the music to bring in another member. We still operate as a duo in pretty much every other way in writing and recording, but it helps us feel a little more engaged and human on stage when we have a little bit more to work with.”
Wye Oak play Central United Church June 21 at 8:30 p.m. as part of Sled Island, which runs June 2024 at various venues. Visit sledisland.com.
There has always been a bit of a treasure-hunt vibe when it comes to fully appreciating Sled Island. No matter how well-versed you already may be when it comes to left-of-the-dial, edgy music, it’s always been a festival of discovery.
With more than 250 musical acts and full programs of film, comedy and art, there is no shortage of options for fans looking for adventurous, challenging experiences from June 20 to 24 at more than 30 venues across the city.
So … recommendations are a bit tricky. Some of Sled’s best moments are ones have to be either sought out or stumbled upon in the quiet — actually, often not-soquiet — corners of the festival.
But, as always, programmers have managed to nab some acts that are both high-profile and also represent some of the more intriguing outer edges of popular music.
Here’s a quick glance.