Jeans Wilder
Totally

Jeans Wilder died a couple of weeks ago. The sad announcement was made on his Facebook page: five likes, half a dozen comments between disbelief and grief. I try to Google “Jeans Wilder” even now, but I can’t find any news about it. I don’t know if Debaser uses some kind of tag or if writing here #jeans #wilder #dead #morto #jeanswilderdead can help to fix it at least partially; anyway, popular wisdom says that to find, you must search, so I fear that my attempt is only a sterile, belated act of devotion. I chose Totally for this review-obituary, his 2012 album, because it’s the best and the one I'm most attached to. Who can tell if at the time Jeans Wilder had an inkling of how it would end up, two years later.

There's no need to abandon the mournful tone since here, in particular, the beach psychedelia pills come down in handfuls, accompanied by large sips of melancholy; it’s nice that a gastric lavage isn’t necessary afterward. But the limping pace of Maple Bars is like when you crawl towards the bathroom while the stereo in the other room keeps playing fifties pop pieces. Jeans Wilder invented the label “dream punk” for himself. Daisy, at the closing, puts almost everything on the table: an organ carpet à la Stereolab on minimal-digital rhythm, enchanting falsetto intrusions, and an inspired vocal line, perhaps vaguely new-wave, even. On the tum tu-tum pa from Be My Baby, Gravity Bong makes you doze and dream on the shore and even makes your mouth water, then; while the naive clap-clap and the monstrous vocal filter of Sunroof are more Wavves than Wavves and the big distortion – even on the drums - Dog Years sounds like Apples in Stereo recorded live on an old Nokia, Limeade adds surf and tambourine and everything slides down leaving significant traces.

Jeans Wilder, for his part, seems to have faded away without leaving a mark in the insignificant world of hype of hip of like of bit, of fedoras and aperitifs; but of this, of course, we must not regret. It's the bitterness that takes hold when you open this page, see that beautiful artwork, that date and realize that in reality the next album will never see the light, not even as a posthumous legacy, because a commercial operation to profit from Jeans Wilder's demise wouldn’t make sense, frankly. The world of likes has decreed that six people, six, were eagerly awaiting the new album, so the world of likes wouldn’t waste even a “not a big deal” on Jeans. But we, who presumably are not algorithmic mechanisms based on trends, on those damn lists like THE TEN SONGS FOR A FREAK BEACH PARTY, on self-promotion, and on plug-ins; we can oppose indifference, celebrate the memory, and trust - at random - in eternal recurrence.

Ladies and gentlemen, let's raise our glasses and bongs and remember Jeans Wilder: abandoned on the beach, sunk with his surf among waves and distortions. Another hero who died for the cause of beautiful music that creates no interest.

RIP JEANS WILDER

2007-2014

Andrew Caddick, however, is presumably fine and continues to live in San Diego and do who knows what.