#447 Wye Oak - Civillian

Big in 2011.

This album gets off to a shaky start, full of cranky Cranberries inflections in the vocals, watery domestic indie arpeggios, a sub-Youth Lagoon sheen of production, plenty of markers of a no-go for me. This is the kind of album that being album-oriented is all about though, since its strengths lie in its structures, its finest moments in the payoff of meandering setups, like Explosions in the Sky songs in miniature.

The setups are all Sonic Youth dissonance, all disaffection and disconnection, with a foreboding of what is to come. The trick is, the setup operates on two levels. The opener builds to an obvious moment for a crashing climax, but then dies off. Then The Alter simmers, but lies at a pot-watched rumble at best. So by the time Holy Holy bursts joyous you're blindsided, having been tricked into overlooking the obvious signs by all the wolf-crying. And then Dogs' Eyes comes in at track 4, builds to an obvious halfway point buildup, pauses, and drops down to nothing. And then it stammers along, and builds again, and then it crashes monumental.

One of the finest moments in game design ever was a small detail in Resident Evil 4. As you stagger through zombie-ravaged wastelands you come across all manner of boxes and containers that, when slashed, give you bullets, money, and other beneficial items. As a player of a survival horror game that is hell-bent on wracking your psyche, you can't help but wonder if there's going to ever be a box that has something bad in it instead. But after hours and hours of gameplay, every single box has been safe, and you just assume that's not part of the deal. Then, maybe an hour or two after your last thought on the matter, THEN there's a fucking deadly snake in a box that scares the everloving bejesus out of you. And you go, "woah! I guess there is a snake in there every once in a while". And then you think about the rate at which you've seen them and when you should start worrying about another one and its somewhere in the midst of that spare-brain-cycle musing that, not 5 minutes later, another goddamn snake leaps out at you. Now you're on edge, having lost any handle on the rhythm of shoe-drops, and its a tension that the game passively milks through 2 or 3 more hours of snake-free gameplay.

That's basically the experience of this album. Full of some ragged, Mogwai/Microphones-worthy crushing walls of doom, full of big hits and big drops, but all the more effective because it swerves as much as it does. I don't think there's a lot of replay value here, and I don't know that I even necessarily enjoyed it (I can't really get with those vocals), but I admire its craft, a masterful piece of songwriting structuring that's worth hearing once 3.5/5

You might like this if: you like the big sudden moments in rock, where the army of guitars leaps from the bushes to assault you, a goddamned Vietnam of an album