Wand
Plum

The Wand are not exactly a particularly famous band, especially in old Europe, yet they have all the credentials, given the sounds they propose, to be considered by a much wider audience.

The new album by the Los Angeles, California quintet was released via Drag City last September 22nd and is titled 'Plum'.

Preceded by two singles, the title track and 'Bee Karma', the new album (the fourth studio LP) by Cory Hanson (fresh from releasing his first solo album last November) and his bandmates (Sofia Arreguin, Evan Burrows, Robert Cody, Lee Landey) marks a definitive departure from those garage and psychedelic sounds that initially led the band to be considered as one of the many phenomena that followed the boom of artists like Ty Segall and Mikal Cronin.

Certainly, the garage traces and the original direction that shaped the band's early steps still remain in their DNA, but here we have something different: Cory Hanson's songwriting is more mature, the sounds are generally less aggressive, and the arrangements more crafted. The influences, rather than being sought in the previously mentioned artists or in psych bands like Thee Oh Sees, tend towards a more intellectual pop-rock like Wilco. Not to mention the nods to a certain British pop-rock tradition starting from The Beatles up to Radiohead's Thom Yorke and Blur's Damon Albarn.

Indeed, this seems like an album produced by Nigel Godrich, revisiting alternative pop-rock sounds of the last twenty-thirty years. Starting from the title track that recalls the songwriting of a certain Paul McCartney (from 'Chaos and Creation in the Backyard') with arrangements halfway between Pavement and Brit-pop fascinations in Blur style. 'Bee Karma' is a pop-rock song with a typically UK-made nineties riff, a freshness typical of Blur, and continuous changes of tempo that recall some Radiohead proposals from 'Ok Computer' or 'The Bends'.

A certain melancholic, leaden vein permeates the tones of the album in all its tracks and in what can be ballads like 'Charles De Gaulle' and a psychedelic pop that picks up arpeggios in the style of Pavement and sixties atmospheres like more experimental Rolling Stones.

'High Rise' is an instrumental track that seems to have been conceived by Jonny Greenwood; 'White Cat' are Radiohead's 'Bodysnatchers' shaken up with sprinkles of 'Sgt. Pepper'

'The Trap' once again showcases Cory Hanson's great songwriting sensitivity: here the distances from a typically garage sound become even more marked. We are faced with a particularly sophisticated and melancholic pop-folk ballad with crescendo arrangements and the reverberated use of choirs that contrast with the sound of synths and steel guitar.

'Ginger' is a kind of instrumental Pavement out-take extracted from 'Crooked Rain Crooked Rain'; 'Blue Cloud' is a Wilco song with Stephen Malkmus components lasting almost eight minutes and with the concluding (another seven minutes) 'Driving' constitutes the album's peak moment, where Wand proves to have completely abandoned the garage and more minimalist dimension and moved away from a certain psych.

Cory Hanson and his bandmates instead present themselves here as the continuators of an alternative Made In USA tradition that began in the nineties with Pavement and continued with bands like The Shins and Wilco. Let's say they may not be particularly original, but if the so-called 'indie rock' was meant to end up somewhere, this seems the right direction to me, and if this album had been released fifteen or twenty years ago, probably by the end of the year everyone would have placed it at the top of their 'favorite' charts.