To the indifferent, Wilderness have now made the same album three times. Or to be really reductive, the same long track. Such sweeping dismissals aren't entirely misguided: Wilderness relentlessly and, yes, perhaps redundantly have their own thing going on. To Wilderness fans, however, that thing the band does-- ominously pitched post-rock-- is mostly compelling, often mesmerizing, and occasionally sublime.
Of course, becoming a fan means a willingness to submit to James Johnson's assaultive yowls and Colin McCann's lacerating guitar. Wilderness aren't just offering daft indulgences, though. As others, including Pitchfork's Brian Howe have suggested, they're a serious, cerebral outfit aiming to exorcise their collective anxieties. And despite the band's two-year hiatus, (k)no(w)here's incremental shifts-- slower tempos, starker arrangements, and the addition of McCann's high, keening backing vocals (which, somewhat disconcertingly, recall Journey's Steve Perry)-- advance the drama.
"High Nero" opens the album with a pensive ambient wash, setting up the jolting entrance of tom throbs, reverbed guitar, and vocal wails all the more jolting. Will Goode and Brian Gossman's superb rhythm section has been overshadowed by Johnson's emoting, but it's pretty close to centerstage on (k)no(w)here. "Soft Cage"'s meticulous drum patter and cool, stalking bass are reminders of why this band earns favorable Fugazi comparisons. And thanks to a deliberate and measured rhythmic core, "Chinese Whisperers" sounds more ragged and sprawling than anything Wilderness have done, .
An even more subtle development-- "subtle" because Wilderness' lyrics are rarely intelligible anyway-- is Johnson's growing distrust of language. The singer's culture-jamming, anti-capitalist lyrics have never relied much on grammar and syntax, but at points in the record he eschews familiar or even representational sounds altogether. This makes more sense when you consider that (k)no(w)here's almost-continuous song stream (notched into eight individual tracks on the album) was composed to support visual artist Charles Long's installation at this year's Whitney Biennial. Long previously collaborated with Stereolab, and if you've seen the artist's playful yet melancholy junk assemblages and bird excrement sculptures, the partnership holds a kind of logic. In fact, now that they've literally made art-rock, perhaps that will close the loop on the band's singular aesthetic and we'll get a fourth album that doesn't sound, to the cynics, exactly like the other three.
