In his novel Martin Dressler: The Tale of an American Dreamer, as well as in numerous short stories, Steven Millhauser has explored the dark gift of genius, particularly in children, and the toll it exacts. His precisely situated historical bildungsromans are rich with period detail and Bunyanesque protagonists who fulfill the wildest promises of their eras, each a larger-than-life manqué whose preternatural abilities (be they in entrepreneurship or the construction of detailed miniature automatons) lead them along the same delirious arc: A meteoric rise to success, a period of virtuosic clarity, and then a flame out as genius shades into unhealthy obsession or is rendered effete by novelty.
It's from such embroidered yet prescient pages that young Wolf-- 6'4", striking, and outlandishly attired-- seems torn wholesale. He began to dabble in recording at age 11, recording violin, junky analog organs, and homemade theremin on his four-track. He joined the art collective Minty at 14 and impressed Fat Cat Records enough that they gave him a computer and mixer to further his explorations. At 16, he left England to form the raucous Mason Crimineaux in France and won over Capitol K, who would release Wolf's solo debut, the bombastic, uncontained electro-folk grab bag Lycanthropy, in 2003.
Until Wolf's story has been written in full, it's impossible to say whether his sophomore effort, Wind in the Wires, belongs to the rapid upsurge or the crystallization of vision, but there are signs to indicate the latter. Millhauser's characters' zeniths of achievement are often presaged by their returning changed from a long absence-- some outer expression of a burgeoning darkness within them. After Lycanthropy put him on the radar, Wolf absconded from London to a cliff-side chalet in Cornwall. The formerly blond singer returned with a shock of black hair and Wind in the Wires, which boils off the excesses of his debut and simmers in elegant pools of glitchy beats, found sound collages, crackling electrical sounds, and gothic shadows.
Wind in the Wires is like Bright Eyes' Digital Ash in a Digital Urn if Nick Cave had made it, a fertile nexus of tradition, technology, and Wolf's powerful pipes, as he romanticizes travel and escape, pines for lost youth at age 21, dreams of domestic pleasures, and takes potshots at a debased culture. "The Libertine" opens the album with clip-clopping hooves, a gypsy-disco beat, sawing violins and a spitting electrical undercurrent as Wolf inveighs against duplicitous priests, immoral heroes and other phonies, while the simpler, poppier "Land's End" gripes about the music industry's promotional apparatus. The languidly beautiful "Teignmouth" longs for release from banality: Over a staticky pulse and angelic choir, Wolf sings, "So when the birds fly south/ I'll reach up and hold their tails/ Pull up and out of here/ And bridle the autumn gales." And on the ukulele madrigal "The Railway House", Wolf imagines the placid contentment of growing old: "So wave goodbye to living alone/ I think we've found our home/ Let's paint these walls and pull up the weeds/ And cast our fevers in stone."
But to focus only on the broader traits is to miss what makes Wind in the Wires so outstanding: Wolf festoons his songs with strange, understated details that ratchet them toward the mysterious. Sputtering electricity, alien frequencies, and sculpted static billow across the record in sparkling clouds. In the midst of the mournful strains of "Ghost Song", a perfectly incongruous Bobby Digital-style "Whoop!" floats up like a bubble, and the same sound of cycling voltage that opens the first song ends the last one, wrapping the album in a closed circuit. Nothing here has been left to chance.
Wolf's strange blend of postmodernism and antiquity is where he seems to break away from being a Millhauser character and gains an affinity with the author himself: Millhauser honors traditional yarning while being fully aware of its archetypal implications; his characters' failures are the waking at the end of the dream or the bleak ending edited out of the fairy tale. For Wolf's sake, one hopes that with Wind in the Wires, he's caught that southbound bird's tail and escaped from Millhauser's inexorable parabola: To be the dreamer of dreams, rather than the dreamt, is clearly his heart's desire.
