by Zach Noel (@zachanoel)
Over a decade or so of playing together, Los Angeles-based psychedelic indie-rock band Wand have carved out an impressive place amongst all manner of music that could be defined as psychedelic. From a spooky, heavy metal-tinged garage trio led by singer-songwriter/guitarist (also of Ty Segall’s Muggers and Mikal Cronin’s band), Cory Hanson, drummer Evan Burrows, and bassist Lee Landey to a fully-realized band amassing an impressive body of work. Wand and Hanson have explored fuzzy, Sabbath-indebted heavy-metal garage-rock riffage (Ganglion Reef ), cleaner, but no-less scuzzy garage-punk and stratospheric space-rock (Golem), psych-folk (The Unborn Capitalist from Limbo), classic rock-isms (Plum), then becoming something more rhythmic, jam-based, and experimental in which all these previous incarnations in sound and style coalesce (Perfume) and to greater success on the sprawling delight that was 2019’s Laughing Matter.
They’ve become a band that is as adept at playing a high-energy punk-rock set with their early material as they are at home playing looser and more jam-based for the older heads looking to bliss out. Their latest incarnation’s guitar-based interplay brings to mind the guitar fantasias of bands such as Wilco and Radiohead (to whom the newer material and Hanson’s nasal, high tenor voice are often compared to), and the noisy, experimental impulses of bands such as Yo La Tengo and Stereolab. I can attest to this based on the very last shows I saw of them in the before-times, where I witnessed all these guiding inclinations duke it out into a wondrous cacophony of skronky, noise-rock jams, with Hanson sometimes even bowing his guitar to add that classic, wild, psych-rock vibe.
Whereas 2016’s solo release The Unborn Capitalist from Limbo saw the Wand bandleader drawing from a rich template of psychedelic-tinged folk music, on 2021’s successor Pale Horse Rider, Hanson sets his sights towards a sound inspired by locales both arid and vast. Songs move at a patient pace, often glacial and restrained, though always with the feeling that there’s always something up his sleeve before the song fades out. These are songs that evoke desolate environs; high deserts, each song a rest-stop at the edge of civilization-where the music blurs in sound and time between past, present, and our not-too distant future. The album bridges the musical influences of early 1970s folk, country, and rock with the atmosphere of the last year in all its stark, dystopian reality, and a future wrought by Biblical apocalypse caused by environmental destruction due to climate change, greed spurred on by unchecked late-capitalism run amok, and of course the pandemic.
These are world-weary anthems for places where wildfires, pale horse riders, gamblers, “silhouettes like mushroom clouds,” phoenixes, the Devil, and “pigs out on patrol” coexist in a ruthless post-apocalyptic Wild West version of America whose reality continues to become ever crueler, stranger, and more surreal. However, while the lyrics may be dark and foreboding, the sound of the record is characterized by bright, cosmic-country, wistful slow-motion folk-rock, slow-burn Floydian epics, two brief yet spacious ambient pieces, and concludes with a rousing closer. I’ve yet to take it on a road trip, but just as Wand’s Laughing Matter was a perfect highway companion to all of my 2019 and the earlier part of 2020, I can without question see this as another strong contender.
All these songs are strengthened by an earthy instrumental palette. Nylon-stringed guitars, weeping steel guitars, mournful violin, hypnotic piano chords, bursts of fuzzy and distorted electric guitar, simple but strong melodies that blossom from warm basslines, restrained drums, and vocals that may sound as comforting as the words sung could be biting. Lyrically, they may offer a balm or no comfort at all, except in our shared certain and inevitable destruction such as on the foreboding title track, where the titular white rider of the Four Horsemen as often prophesied, will bring about death and destruction. “Sooner or later the Devil will come and the rider’s gonna cut him down with everyone,” Hanson sings before each chorus, this cryptic mantra, eventually becoming something like a twisted lullaby with the addition of harmonies that contrast it with an odd sweetness. The tone is soon shifted in the chorus however when the rider is begged not to carry out this prophecy in what sounds like a desperate plea. Though the white rider is often associated with death, it can also signify a great change: what may be laid to waste, may also bring about new beginning or birth, which lends the song’s lyrics a cryptic duality.
Opener “Paper Fog” glides along with a serene backdrop and tons of space to let the sound slowly consume you, as it bobs along with a pleasant breeziness. “Angeles” is a minor-key dark night of the soul through “the smoke and fire” that “rises like a phoenix or bird of paradise,” in which Hanson sings of white-noise songs sung under the surveilling of helicopters, dreams of a psychoanalyst mother egging his car and ambulance drivers, and looking “the beast right in the eyes'' in order to confront your inner demons. This all gives way to retro electric piano plucks and a hazy ending, as if the band itself is being obscured by the smoke. It’s a song that though its imagery may be surreal and specific, its message is universal for anyone who’s had to face themself or has experienced struggles with their own mental health at any time in their life. It’s in the face of these larger concerns that we are reminded that we are not alone and that a record like this could be comforting listeners willing to offer their time to it.
A surreal Americana of disparate images is constructed on the epic slow-burn of the penultimate track “Another Story From the Center of the Earth” one of “nights where no one sleeps more than an hour” and those that have “skin looks like jewelry.” Sounds of amber and copper, where under a “fluorescent moonlight...dust clouds shine like rusted diamonds.” A burnished guitar reappears to cast its heat like sweltering, desert sunlight on the listener; the tone growing fuzzier, the playing more unhinged into a punctuated sustain of broken-up notes that gets fainter and less audible like a dying distress signal in the middle of nowhere. The guitar’s gated fuzz swells, but finally dies out, as the band grows quieter.
On Pale Horse Rider, Cory Hanson paints a grim, portrait of a ruined, American wasteland, where the myths and archetypes that we think we’ve long overcome, continually haunt us and remind us of the darkness that has always lingered there. It is only when we confront it can we learn to exist within it and survive. Yes, it may test us, break us, and often corrupt us, but only by challenging the darkness of this feedback loop that we find ourselves in can we find it within ourselves to create new myths and archetypes of our own and in doing so close it for good, breaking the cycle.