There's a boring trope in responses to noise-based music that goes something like, "You won't get it unless you turn it up so loud that," and follows with the grisly description of a physical ailment or violation of a city ordinance. But the logic of only understanding music when it inspires you to nausea is about a step away from saying it's easier to agree with conservatives on C-SPAN if you vacuum while they talk-- volume can obscure as much as it might reveal. Listen to Baltimore's Wzt Hearts loud if you have an arbitrary preference for loudness.
But there's nothing on Threads Rope Spell Making Your Bones that suggests you have to, and there's plenty to suggest you shouldn't. Though at times trenchant and aggressively noisy, there's nothing particularly bodily about the album. So, caution to the horror and viscera freaks, who won't find anything that sounds like a yeast infection (too sexual and gross, too intimate) or the breaking of a fever (too glorious and climactic, too confused). Instead, Wzt Hearts bundle digital noise and the tasteful drumming of Shaun Flynn with unstable organ drones and long stretches of shaped hiss. Though the record evokes urbanity, the feeling isn't industrial or militaristic-- there's a loose, folk-like quality to it.
In that sense, it's just as reasonable to listen to it at a normal volume, to let its waxes and wanes crest at the level of distant traffic. But listening to it as ambience-- admittedly, this is a very tough quality to talk about-- reveals a certain "unstickiness," for lack of a better term. Though Wzt Hearts clearly suggest a chromed-out, decaying city through their sound, it's painted to varying degrees of clarity; as a listener, I find myself sliding around under the drum flutters of "Hearth Carver" or the terminal wooziness of "Viszla", but other pieces remind me that I left the oven on or that it's sunny outside. This might have something to do with inertia, it might have to do with composition-- Threads isn't exactly a record of discrete or easily articulated qualities. And for however refreshing the digital ambience is-- the elements on Threads pickle in static but never surrender to a big, warm, nasty picture-- much of it feels curiously stuck in 2D.
But there's no point in harping on the band's shortcomings considering how great how great "Hearth Carver" and "Viszla" are, and how much better they sound than on last year's live Heat Chief (Zach Baron, in his Pitchfork review, rated it higher than I would have). Though it's not something you'd often say about doomsayers, with Wzt Hearts, it's worth hoping for the future.
