At a time when violently distorted, nearly atonal rage rap can scratch the mainstream while avant-garde jazz artists fuse traditional band arrangements with the unearthly sound design of club music’s vanguard, it’s no small feat that WRENS’ “Charlie Parker” manages to be one of the year’s strangest singles in either genre. As drummer Jason Nazary sets the Brooklyn band’s wounded gait slightly ahead of plucky synths and a flute in hysterics, frontman and trumpeter Ryan Easter starts kicking a verse that recontextualizes boilerplate trap and drill lines into the jazz world. He’s pointing Smith & Wessons at the opps; whipping chickens on the stove like they’re the roadkill the track’s titular saxophonist ate on the day he earned his famous nickname. There are layers to the playfulness. Ikue Mori-esque data chirps, drunken basslines, and mashed drumfills tussle in a cartoon dust cloud as Easter manipulates his identity in the foreground. He dons the masks of the street rap mafioso, jazz virtuoso, and sensitive young man, each of them a character, each of them overlapping to reveal their similarities. Music packed with this many bells, whistles, and in-jokes should read as gimmicky. WRENS, however, have the chops and taste to emerge with their sincerity intact—a trick they pull time and time again on their sophomore effort, Half of What You See.
WRENS’ 2023 debut double album, alligator shoes [on flatbush], chronicled two formative sessions that captured their sound before and after the addition of cellist Lester St. Louis. While this rawer early material demonstrated the band’s shared taste for musically dense yet texturally weightless improvisation, the record sometimes felt maximalist for eccentricity’s sake, as if each member was anxious to one-up the other’s IDM-adjacent synth timbre. Half of What You See sounds no less quirky, but it’s more intentional and patient. On instrumental cut “Longbow,” the electronics treat the performance’s surface without intruding on the tense harmonic conversation between bowed cello and murmuring keys. There’s still heavy traffic within the stereo field, but none of the individual parts is in a rush to get its ideas across. The strings pace back and forth in measured loops while Easter and pianist Elias Stemeseder riff on the same ruminant phrases. Each of the individual performers’ personalities cuts through the collective unease, as when the initially gorgeous ambient synth progression on “Intro” sours for a few bars, briefly sending the band into panic before Easter’s trumpet stabilizes things.
When Easter lowers his instrument to pick up the mic, however, the band truly jells, like on the sinister, punchline-laden “Snake.” Here, he wields Biblical imagery to embody both sides of a rap god/devil dichotomy, adopting a drawn-out, deliberate flow that’s a cross between Earl Sweatshirt and Lil B. His casual humor and rootedness in the everyday grounds the band’s abstraction. Despite the high-art stylistics and references to New Testament lore, Easter is honest enough to express his vulgar human desires to “sit atop a bag like an audience for Oprah” or “watch you toot that ass.” In blurring the lines between divine and mundane, between highbrow and lowbrow, Easter needles the mysterious, academic veneer of avant-garde jazz, focusing on the raw thrill of the music at its core. As popular forms of hip-hop beat production and club music sound increasingly complex and overstimulating, he acts as a liaison between worlds, making the case that it can all be fun and freaked-out in the same way.
Like electric Miles or Ornette Coleman’s flirtations with post-punk on Of Human Feelings, WRENS’ electroacoustic jazz-rap is messy and sincere, unafraid to carve out new paths even if it means breaching awkward territory or dissonance. Half of What You See is chaotic and peculiar because it’s the product of four talented improvisers pursuing their unconventional interests: Its idiosyncrasies never feel forced, because at the end of the day, their creativity remains grounded in the flesh. As Easter says on “Interlude,” “All I got to say is I hope that for all this work we do…there’s some ass when I get back home.”
