At some point, for Jenn Wasner, all the praise she attracted as a guitarist began to grow complicated. “It felt so strange to have the focus shift from my songs and ideas to my guitar playing,” the Wye Oak leader shared in an essay this summer. “‘This chick shreds!’ ‘Hey, you can really play!’” Wasner saw how her own guitar work was often cast as a spectacle, in contrast to her equally talented male bandmates. “No one draws any additional attention to them — it is taken in stride,” Wasner wrote. “Meanwhile, time and time again, you are fawned over like a child who’s just taken her first steps.”
It’s no wonder, then, why Wasner took a trial separation from the guitar with Wye Oak’s 2014 *Shriek—*though it only served to reinforce how integral the instrument was to the band’s identity. That record fit a pattern of extremes: Wye Oak’s 2011 breakthrough Civilian was guitar-rock; Shriek was their synthesized reinvention; and the one-off LP from Wasner’s side-project Dungeonesse was an exercise in Mariah Carey-worshipping pop. In contrast to those albums, each built around clear or implicit parameters, her debut LP as Flock of Dimes, If You See Me, Say Yes, is simply a Jenn Wasner record. It’s the most all-encompassing showing of her tastes yet, representing in equal measure guitars and synths, dreamy indie rock and digital pop. Along with Wye Oak’s Tween, a collection of outtakes released earlier this year, it’s proof that Wasner does her best work when she doesn’t impose restraints on herself.
Wasner has adjusted her vision for Flock of Dimes since its early singles. She began the project as a channel for beat-heavy experiments that didn’t fit under the Wye Oak umbrella, but as that band grew increasingly synth-minded itself, Flock of Dimes became more straightforward, an outlet for her most revealing songs. It’s a meaningful evolution for a songwriter who once thrived on obfuscation. An air of secrecy hung over Wye Oak’s best records, a haze that rendered key sentiments cryptic. Even the consonant-swallowing slur in Wasner’s voice seemed like a form of omission.
But her songs on If You See Me are bright and open, documenting with clear prose new beginnings, the passage of time, and—poetically for an album she mostly recorded alone—the hermetic tendencies that keep her at a distance from even the closest people in her life. On the rippling “Given/Electric Life,” Wasner admits that she’s “Afraid to be seen as I see myself/Even more to be seen as I really am” and resorts to counting down the days. And as if summoning the more approachable, carefree person she longs to be, the music is deliberately outgoing. The radiant “Everything Is Happening Today” looks to the extroverted thump of her neighbors and labelmates Sylvan Esso, while “Ida Glow” corrals its Gary Numan-esque synths around a pumping disco-house beat. Even “You, the Vatican,” a Wye Oak-sounding number about the most Wye Oak of subjects—death—is delivered with reassuring warmth.
On an album like Civilian or Shriek, that song might have chilled to the bone, with guitars either severely squalling or eerily absent. But here Wasner’s guitars amble amicably alongside her, refracting light over her songs without upstaging or overwhelming them. There’s never the slightest threat they’ll erupt into a blistering solo, the way they so often used to. As awesome as those solos always were, they’re barely missed here. If You See Me may lack some of the tension and menace of Wye Oak’s best records, but that’s a fair tradeoff for an album this personable and at peace with itself.
