The insert that comes with Ganglion Reef, the debut album by Los Angeles’ Wand, is printed with the kind of map that might appear in the front of a fantasy novel, full of fanciful coastlines and tidal whorls. It seemingly depicts Ganglion Reef itself—an imaginary island that the members of Wand might just frequent from time to time, perhaps transported there by the same psychotropic substances that fuel their music. Travel, after all, is what Ganglion Reef is all about: the passageways between one place or state of mind to another. Accordingly, it moves.
Frontman Cory Thomas Hanson is a mover himself. In addition to playing (usually fleetingly) with a wide array of fellow L.A. garage-rockers over the past few years, from together PANGEA to Meatbodies to Mikal Cronin, the singer/guitarist/keyboardist helms the electronic pop project WHITE. Hanson just can’t sit still, and accordingly what makes Ganglion Reef so euphorically hypnotic is the way it translates his itinerant, hyperkinetic tendencies into song. “Clearer” stomps and throbs through a barrage of zap-gun bursts and bongo-punctuated, acid-flashback breakdowns; beneath it all, riffs the size of thunderbolts hurl the song through wormhole after wormhole. Hanson’s breathy, elfin voice glides overheard, but it’s only half as ethereal as his steam-calliope synths and creamy smears of distortion.
The albums most fantastic voyage is “Fire on the Mountain (I-II-III)”, an epic that manages to condense itself into a relatively compact five minutes. Unpacking it is effortless, but not without effect; Hanson’s high, glassy coo is light years away from Lee Landey’s infernally heavy bassline, and the gulf between them is a vacuum that yanks at sanity. The airlock is completely breached by the time the track hits its second movement, a spasm of Paleolithic proto-metal that wrestles with Hanson’s progressive-folk sprawl. It’s way too much to fit coherently into a single song, but coherence isn’t the endpoint. When an aural lightshow of intertwined synths and guitar solos lifts and soars like the Verve with a sci-fi fetish, it feels like infinity has cracked open.
Hanson’s fantasy bent is even more pronounced on “Strange Inertia (Ctrl Alt Death)”, a shakily scrawled love letter to other dimensions that expends every Crayola in the box, and “Flying Golem”, a surrealist lullaby that resembles "Adventure Time" fanfic set to singsong psychedelia. Fantasy gaming is referenced more explicitly on “Generator Larping”—but instead of coming across as a live-action role-playing session of World of Warcraft, it spends six minutes daydreaming the Beatles’ “Tomorrow Never Knows” as rendered in a Neu!-like cascade of sine waves and pulses. There’s a faint krautrock undertow to Ganglion Reef, but it’s motorik for a sandy beach instead of the Autobahn.
Plenty of new psych-rock albums are content to fill the signifier checklist and then just sit there, but Ganglion Reef is as much a vehicle as a destination—and rather than wallowing in inner space, it’s a gateway to other worlds, not so much an escape as an intrepid exploration. It’s fun, sure, but it’s also thrillingly restless, at times almost desperate. “Run for your life,” Hanson chants on “Broken Candle”, an organ-toggled, kaleidoscopically melodic dreamscape that could be an evolutionary offshoot of the Zombies’ “Brief Candles”. It sounds like winsome nonsense, but it’s telling. Prowling and propulsive, Wand are musical sharks; if they stop swimming, they’ll die. No wonder Ganglion Reef is the liquid, liminal domain they made for themselves to dwell in.
