For years it seems Wheat fans have fallen into two camps. On one hand there are those who prefer the band's second album, 1999's Hope & Adams, which featured pop music sharply refined to its sleekest, simplest assemblage of elements: a riff, a verse, a chorus, a fade, not necessarily in that order. Minimalist to a fault, Hope & Adams sounded like it was made to be shed immediately: Its appeal continues to lie in its embrace of the ephemeral as transcendence. Then there are those who prefer Wheat's 2001 major-label debut Per Second Per Second Per Second...Every Second, which refines Scott Levesque's songwriting and finds him organizing his ideas within more traditional song structures. The result is a power-pop album that's more memorable than its predecessor-- but in this case, that's a neutral adjective. To fans of Hope & Adams, Per Second sounds too polished and radio-friendly, as if the band (or their label) were smoothing over their eccentricities for a spot on the Elizabethtown soundtrack, but to fans of Per Second, Hope & Adams sounds hopelessly obtuse, wasting its potential hooks on songs that seemed unfinished.
Ostensibly, Wheat's fourth album, Everyday I Said a Prayer for Kathy and Made a One Inch Square, attempts to reconcile these two factions by giving musical weight to Levesque's songs while avoiding obvious pop structures. In doing so, however, it has the potential to alienate both camps: Toying with sound and rhythm, noise and melody, Square is less minimalist than Hope, more fractured than Second. It's the band's first record in nearly four years, during which time they were dropped from their label and long-time member Ricky Brennan departed. But Square is not a return to form, mainly because Wheat have never really had a set form to begin with.
The songs on Square follow their own logic, as if Wheat are trying to make them move nonlinearly. After a burst of synth noise, opener "Closeness" sets up a wordy chorus that eventually gives way to a passage of ahooooo's that goes on about twice as long as you'd expect before returning to the main melody. "Little White Dove" ends with a lengthy coda that layers Levesque's vocals in a round with Brendan Harney's rolling snare. These songs always promise some sort of pop pay-off-- a supremely catchy hook, a buoyant riff, a momentous push-- but make a point of rarely delivering on it. Sometimes this tendency can be frustrating and even a little disingenuous on the band's part, as if Levesque and Harney are consciously holding back. As a result, Square sounds like an album lacking verses and choruses and comprised entirely of bridges.
But Levesque and Harney aren't subverting listener expectations so much as they are ignoring them altogether, so the album's disjointedness, mostly comes across as playful, allowing each passage to stand on its own: the guitar fanfare on "Init. 005 (Formerly, a Case of...)", the high-hat-heavy beat on "I Had Angels Watching Over Me", the spoken insistences on "An Exhausted Fixer", the crack in Levesque's voice as he tries to hit the high notes on "Saint in Law". In a sense, these moments exist independently from one another, like the one-inch squares for Kathy that fill up the package design. By the middle of the album, the songs have grown almost collagistic, especially the pairing of "Init. 005 (Formerly, a Case of...)" and "Saint in Law", but they are merely an intermission before the reinvigorated rush of "What You Got" picks up the frayed pop threads again and carries it through to the instrumental closer "Courting Ed Templeton".
Weaving through these moments is a larger story of loss, grief, and recovery, as if a single tragic event has inspired this album. Levesque constantly hints at it by flirting with lyrical cliché. The chorus of "Move=Move" seems to crib from Sting-- "the things u love should be set free"-- but Levesque tempers it with a dose of realism-- "The things u love can get off track/ Because everything don't come back." On "I Had Angels Watching Over Me", the Hallmark-friendly title forms the basis of an uneasy conversation: "I recall a friend said, I had angels watching over me/ I thought that they were making fun of me." Levesque's dryly self-deprecating delivery makes the line register as a humbling joke. Fortunately, that story remains just under the surface throughout Square, where you can make out its shape but not its specifics. It's enough to give weight and direction to what otherwise might simply seem like separate one-inch squares of music.
