Civilian opens with the sound of ambient chatter, a room full of voices quickly washed away by steeled guitar and electronics. It's a shift at odds with the polar dynamics this Baltimore-based duo has sworn by in its half-decade career. In a 2009 interview, The Onion's AV Club asked guitarist/vocalist Jenn Wasner if her band's knack for suddenly juicing volume was done with the live experience in mind. "We won't admit this to ourselves often," Wasner said, "but the way we play live is based on loud-quiet breaks, super-huge jumps in volume and distortion. Sometimes it's really important to explode with huge amounts of volume. Whether it's out of a creative impulse, or just an angry one where it's like, 'Hey everyone, look over here!'….It's fun to absolutely dominate a room for a couple of seconds." But those first seconds of opener "Two Small Deaths" are telling: On this, their third full-length, Wye Oak's tendency to smack listeners with giant, unannounced surges of distortion has been tempered. Wasner and Stack have taken to sanding the edges between quiet and loud, gentle and rough, hard and soft, clean and dirty. From there they've crafted their best LP yet.
It's an awful lot of ground for a duo to cover, but these two have their ways. As in the case of the White Stripes, it starts with Wasner's guitar. While Marnie Stern and Kaki King tend to run away with top honors and attention amongst female guitarists, Wasner's wailing has remained largely unnoticed. Civilian should change that. Whether it's spare, elegant chords like those on closer "Doubt", or the corkscrewing figures of "The Alter" and Sonic Youth snarl of "Holy Holy", she displays marvelous range and power.
Since Wye Oak began recording under the Merge flag in 2008, their combination of boy-girl hymns and dreamy, sometimes shoegazing sonics, have garnered accurate comparisons to the likes of Yo La Tengo. Though they still hew closely to 90s indie rock, their label found a way of describing their sound best as "21st Century Folk." That's a big umbrella but it works because one very malleable influence imbues this particular set of songs more than any other: Neil Young. You can hear Shakey in Wasner's storytelling just as much as her guitar-playing, this album's titular track and centerpiece. It's a fingerpicked, relationship still life that slowly expands before erupting into a clenched-fist coda solo that's one of this album's most arresting moments.
But don't sleep on Stack. His time-keeping here is understated when it ought to be and gargantuan when a song's climb requires it, the tick-tocking-turned-feral stomp of "Dogs Eyes" rolling both into one. More impressive, however, are the synth elements he adds to each effort; they breathe life into spaces that didn't have any before. I have yet to hear these songs played live, but together, as they are on record here, this band sounds like more than just an army stuffed into a bedroom. While plodders like "Fish" and "Plains" revert back to extremes, late burner "We Were Wealth" does the exact opposite. What begins as a languid, guitar-driven mood piece, blooms into something far more delicious. Wasner's satin vocals lift, Stack couples a key-driven pulse with splashes of delay and crash cymbal, and what we're left with is fireworks of a dozen colors. They have our attention from beginning to end.
