Craig Wedren, WAND

By Ben Sullivan

Craig Wedren has patiently, tastefully, and with seeming ease produced one of this year’s strongest albums in WAND, and I’d like to dispense with any scant appeals to critical distance or reportorial objectivity and simply enthuse about it.

In our cultural moment of diminishing attention and mile-long listening queues, WAND‘s 16 songs have me enthralled and inspired (and my last.fm account will testify to this). From the ringing Andrew Bird-isms of “Fall In” to the liminal bedroom contours of “Lady Ghost” and all points in between, I have retraced the album’s swift 48 minutes from their immediate impact—like hearing Wedren’s importunate falsetto for the first time—to the warm blanket of familiarity.

Wedren served as frontman to DC’s criminally underappreciated Shudder to Think in a run stretching from DC kingmaker label Dischord to video budgets and per diems on Epic. The band obstinately refused easy categorization throughout its all-too-brief recorded output. From their youthful, obtuse post-hardcore beginnings through later appeals to classic ’60s pop songwriting, Wedren’s signature alien vibrato and alternately breathy and operatic delivery belied the muscularity of their sound. Pony Express Record, 1994’s largely unheralded art-rock masterpiece, remains a shibboleth for a cadre of musicians weaned on ’90s alternative: an inscrutable, angular luminosity, a moment of transcendental otherness . . . a record that’s kept me up far too late listening, writing, and perhaps emulating myself.

Wedren has since made a name for himself scoring television (United States of Tara) and film (School of Rock, etc.) with a combination of pop performance and instrumental compositions. But the question remained through one strong if unremarkable solo album proper: would he ever pick up where Shudder to Think left off and provide another glimpse into the bristling intelligence and beauty of his work in the ’90s? 2007’s one-off reunion with former guitarist Nathan Larson gave the converted new hope.

And WAND is an emphatic delivery, a culmination of 20-plus years of songwriting and song-based sonic experimentation. The damnably remarkable thing is that not only does Wedren seem blithely unconcerned with seeming hip or topical on WAND, he recapitulates his entire body of work with a maturity, editorial restraint, and savoir faire that would astound in a musician of half his caliber.

Apropos the cover, WAND is a bedazzling, variegated suite that, in its press release, claims allegiance to the delicious excesses of capital-c classics The White Album and Sandinista. But where detractors might claim that Wedren simply accentuated the eros in supererogatory rock grandstanding in the past, any indulgences are now in service of song and idea.

Wedren’s melodies, tortuous as ever, flit and pull each arrangement along in painterly compliance. And throughout the lyrical fragments of memory, loss, and desire, the sound and playing is honed, skilled, and never overworked. Mark Watrous’ guitar reminds me of Michael Tighe’s playing on Buckley’s posthumous Sketches for My Sweetheart The Drunk: soaring while subservient to the melodic and harmonic ideas of each song, cut of the same cloth to a degree that the music remains of one mind. You couldn’t ask for better accompaniment than Watrous delivers here.

The span of influences you’re bound to find shows that Wedren has been listening and taking notes, developing his voice in light of Radiohead’s rise (refer to the first single, “We Are”), Boards of Canada (“In School”); Japanese industrial glam (seriously . . . listen to “Rectory Girl”); and former contemporaries like Long Fin Killie and the aforementioned Jeff Buckley (“Poolkiss” and “Lady Ghost”).

“Heaven Sent” is perhaps the most ideal marriage of mid-period Scott Walker, Nick Drake and Brian Wilson that will ever be recorded: sumptuous, unpredictable, gratifying, heart-breaking, poetic and richly associative. And “Cupid” . . . “Cupid” is quite literally the sequel to Pony Express‘s “Earthquakes Come Home” and “Kissi Penni,” moving with its own unperturbed, skewed logic. The bridge alone got me out of my chair with a fist pump, an exemplar of Wedren’s nonpareil phrasing detailing dispersive thoughts and notions that recombine into those gloriously pointed constructions of Shudder to Think.

WAND is that rare thing, a gloriously musical pop album that makes no apologies for the intensity of its focus and execution, but doesn’t overreach or push its listeners away with bluster and six-string ego. Stripped down, fleshed out, fun, energetic, delicate, impeccable, and casual.

And maybe this is the right time for Wedren to play this hand; perhaps these songs have been in the shop for the last dozen years and he toiled to get this record sounding this incredible. And with artists like St. Vincent, Twin Shadow, Grizzly Bear, and others in their ascent, maybe he can turn some heads, earn some converts, and perform this album within 200 miles of my lonely neck of the Midwest.

All right Craig, I’ll compromise on Chicago. See you there.

WAND was released on September 27 through Neverland Records. The album is available from iTunes.

Craig Wedren will be playing at L.A.’s Bootleg Theater on October 18. Please check out Craig’s website for more information.