Sunday, September 9, 2012

Wild Nothing, Nocturne, 2012

Sunday Run Album Review

Why do we like certain things and not like other things?  How do you describe how something sounds?  That's what I think about every time I decide to do one of these album reviews.  Music is one of those areas, like politics or sports or religion, where people often speak in absolutes.  "Nickelback is the worst band in the world!"  "Kid A is the greatest album ever recorded."  I try not to do too much of that here.  For better or for worse, I try to latch onto the positive aspects of the things I hear, even if they don't really grab me on the initial listen.  Someone likes most of this stuff, after all.

Sometimes, though, I come across something that I really like and want to review here; but I just can't figure out what I like about it.  Or, more precisely, I can't figure out a way to put into words the reasons I like it.  That's what's been happening with Nocturne by Wild Nothing.  I've been listening to, and enjoying, the record since its release.  I just haven't been able to figure out what to say about it.  I took it for a run today and decided to give it a try.

Wild Nothing is Blacksburg, Virginia's Jack Tatum, and Nocturne is his sophomore full-length.  Like Captured Tracks labelmates, DIIV, Wild Nothing mines the 1980's post-punk sound.  While DIIV tends toward the darker aspects of that sound, though, Wild Nothing follows that sound's evolution to shimmering pop on Nocturne.

The record opens with "Shadow" and its I-feel-like-I've-heard-this-somewhere-before, Cure-inspired riff.  That riff runs through the entire song and sticks in your head long after the first listen.  The title track combines guitars, synths, and vocals into a meticulously produced package in a way similar to what's been so successful for a band like Phoenix.  The jangly guitar that runs through "Only Heather" is a sound I've been in love with for a few years now.  Before I even knew its title, "This Chain Won't Break" reminded me, on some level, of Erasure's "Chains of Love."  It still does.  Though when I compare the songs side-by-side, it's less obvious to me.  Some of that 1980's darkness does show up on tracks "Paradise" and "The Blue Dress."

Maybe it's the way in which Tatum takes these different styles and creates a wonderfully unified album that makes it difficult for me to pinpoint exactly what it is that I find so appealing.  But Nocturne is one of those rare albums that works well both as background music -- there aren't any jarring shifts or songs that don't fit -- and as something that rewards critical listening.

And I've been in a bit of a 1990's mode lately, attending concerts by Sebadoh and Built to Spill and hungrily pre-ordering albums by Bob Mould and Dinosaur Jr.  I know what I like about those bands:  clever songwriting, guitars, loudness, noise, all wrapped up in a poppiness and a sense of time and place.  Nocturne is more subtle than that.  I think it's just taken a while to reconfigure my mind into appreciating a different, but still familiar, sound that takes me to a different time and a different place.



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