Plumbiferous Media

Wye Oak, for­merly Monarch, released its sec­ond album Tues­day under the Merge label. The band, named after its home state of Maryland’s hon­orary state tree, car­ries its indie-folk sound cleanly and dis­tinctly, but the album itself is heav­ily opi­ate. The hyp­notic qual­ity of the sound affects the entire album, forc­ing what might oth­er­wise have been an above-average album down a great num­ber of points.

Indi­vid­u­ally, the instru­ment lines on The Knot are mid­dling at best. While the drums, gui­tar, or key­board occa­sion­ally dip out of medi­oc­rity for an inter­est­ing few sec­onds, such as in the nicely con­trast­ing sec­tion around the two minute mark in “I Want for Noth­ing,” or the build­ing begin­ning of “Tat­too,” and the parts are gen­er­ally well played, they are char­ac­ter­ized by sim­ple, highly repet­i­tive sec­tions. After “Tattoo“‘s intro­duc­tion, the track loses any sort of direc­tion entirely until it abruptly tran­si­tions to a sec­ond, equally motion­less sec­tion. It then moves back and forth a few more times until the remain­ing four min­utes have elapsed.

When the instru­men­tals are con­sid­ered together, they move from mediocre to som­nif­er­ous: when the key­board is not play­ing a line that barely moves, entirely smooth­ing out any inter­est­ing wrin­kles in the gui­tar or drum lines, it’s play­ing a line that does not quite fit rhyth­mi­cally with the rest of the parts, adding quite a bit of mess to the music - espe­cially dur­ing the louder sec­tions of the album - and pro­duc­ing a sound that is truly nar­cotic. This sound per­vades the album, but most strongly affects the longer tracks, includ­ing “Mary Is Mary.”

Both Andy Stack and Jenn Was­ner con­tribute vocals to The Knot, though this col­lab­o­ra­tion doesn’t lend much vari­a­tion to the album, as Stack’s vocals lead clearly on only the first track. After “Milk on Honey,” on which Stack is pro­fi­cient but not espe­cially inter­est­ing, Was­ner takes up lead vocal duties for the remain­der of The Knot. It’s at this point that the album moves from unin­ter­est­ing to utterly soporific. In cre­at­ing a mediocre copy of the voices of every other singer in the genre, Was­ner seems to have per­fected instead the art of the drone, slip­ping along her vocal scale while slur­ring the lyrics them­selves, mak­ing them largely incom­pre­hen­si­ble, and fill­ing The Knot with inof­fen­sive and utterly monot­o­nous noise.

Those lyrics that aren’t obscured by Wasner’s blurred singing are about as excit­ing as the rest of the music - generic to the point that “cliché” would seem a com­ple­ment. It’s also fairly clear that these lines don’t stand out because they’re espe­cially good but sim­ply because of where in the music they are placed; the fact that, for exam­ple, “You either win it / Or you don’t” is one of very few entirely audi­ble lines on “For Prayer” isn’t entirely attrib­ut­able to bad taste on the part of Wye Oak, but luck on the part of the line - or bad luck on the part of the listener.

One of a very small set of lyri­cal suc­cesses on The Knot is “Take It In,” a song which, rather fit­tingly on such a sleep-inducing album, focuses on sleep­ing. Phrases such as “Half the day awake / Half again asleep,” which dis­play a poetic apti­tude utterly absent (or per­haps inaudi­ble) on the rest of the album, dis­tin­guish the track as the most inter­est­ing on the album (though it cer­tainly still suf­fers from many of the issues of the album as a whole), leav­ing us won­der­ing why the rest of The Knot couldn’t at least have met that low standard.

The Knot is not a bad album, at least in tech­ni­cal terms. Stack and Was­ner seem to know what they’re doing on at least a fun­da­men­tal level. Instead, the main prob­lem with The Knot is a com­plete lack of energy through­out the album. Even the most overly loud sec­tions of “For Prayer” can’t drag the album out of its tran­quil mood, to the point where it’s hard to dis­tin­guish parts of the album apart, except, per­haps, by the level of sleep they induce. If Wye Oak’s goal was the cre­ation of an effec­tive sleep aid, this would be a suc­cess, but as an album it’s intensely bor­ing, and that’s the only inten­sity that The Knot even approaches.

This post is tagged 30-39, Wye Oak