WAND

When he raised the solo signals a the better part of a decade ago, Cory Hanson seemed to siphon off the slower impulses for his own works, leaving the fire and fusion to Wand. Yet, with Western Cum arriving as one of his most tumultuous albums yet, it seems the switches have flipped between the barriers. Now, Vertigo isn’t devoid of drama and drive, nor cinder and smoke, but it’s certainly a more patient vision of what Wand has embraced over the past few years. The album has a cohesive slink to it, rising and falling like tides painted by moonlight. Strings slip through many of the tracks — a silken thread that ties the album together songs melt into one another. Where Wand was often fond of throwing quite a few styles into the still in the past, the works on Vertigo feel like they were all conjured from the same strange magic. They work as singles, but they truly shine as one larger piece.

Plum and Laughing Matter strove for this feeling, prog-tipped gems that found the band expanding but not always carving into the marrow like this. The first half of the album builds, catching a boil on “Mistletoe,” but never hitting the UV bake of Western Cum, instead letting the songs steam and drip down the speakers. “Lifeboat” sidles them as close to jazz as they’ve ever been, before they finally unbutton a bit on “High Time,” letting the boil that had begun earlier froth with a bit more fury and quite a bit more feedback. While it might be easy to attribute the shift to lineup changes and a general paring down of the band, it’s also a sign of Hanson and, to a large extent Burrows finding in interplay that doesn’t overshadow their nuance. The rhythms anchor the album, a subtle push through puddles of sound. Wand has sounded bigger and bolder in the past, but with a touch of restraint they’ve rarely sounded more assured.

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