Wussy’s unlikely genesis occurred in 2001, when young singer Lisa Walker was scouted by 42-year-old Chuck Cleaver, the heavily bearded Ass Ponys frontman, who would, in later years, quit his day job as a stonemason to sell antiques. Cleaver and Walker, who also dated, wrote sharply about suburban malaise and domestic grievances, with a knack for unsentimental intimacy redolent of Rilo Kiley and Secaucus-era Wrens. A breakthrough of sorts came in 2012 with Buckeye, a career-spanning compilation blending spry country, poppy postpunk, wintry emo, and shabby folk-pop. A fan base grew in their native Ohio without threatening to break the levees, but 2014’s tentatively anthemic Attica! cast a wider net.
While hardly a volte-face, Forever Sounds, the quintet's sixth LP, is bleaker and more difficult than its predecessor. The album is full of darkly valiant shoegaze, swirly chords met by solos that send the narrator tumbling into the abyss. Despite the vast scale, there remains something resolutely midwestern in the delivery: Where dream-pop vocals tend to glide along with the music, Cleaver’s voice is small yet oratory, as if he has a fascinating story to tell but is startled by the volume of his microphone. Walker taps into a similar feeling–of ennui and passion constantly thwarting each other–but dials down the gravity further. On opener "Dropping Houses," she sounds eerily subdued, ready to disintegrate in the atmosphere.
Forever Sounds, then, is the work of a band less interested in telling stories than smothering themselves in obscurity and noise. "Donny’s Death Scene," with its prominent pedal steel and *Big Lebowski-*referencing story, concerns mundane personal failures being reconciled on an epic scale. Walker’s lyrics ("Donny’s fading in the bright, bowling alley lights," goes the chorus) give Steve Buscemi’s meek character the sendoff John Goodman couldn’t, but like much of the album, the abiding themes are as much a product of the music as the words.
It’s just as well, because the discernible lyrics, particularly Cleaver’s, are knottier than usual, and sometimes overwritten. Usually adept at incisive couplets, Cleaver seems preoccupied with sounding poetic on Forever Sounds, to mixed results: "Who robbed the wishing well?/ Looks like there’s nothing coming true," from "Better Days," is several degrees too precious. And on the psychedelically inclined "Sidewalk Sale," he observes his muse "sucking on a chili dog/ Out in the desert where the heat is hot," which is maybe a little heavy on the exposition, desert-wise.
Thanks to its stately pace and generous decorative effects, the music is cozy enough to hibernate under. The words, while sometimes clumsy, can also be disarmingly poignant: On "Hello, I’m a Ghost," Cleaver laments an ex-lover who’s "undressed 700 more times and I’ve missed every one"; Walker sings, sweetly, "It’s not your failed endeavour/ That lights up your name forever" on "Majestic-12." Where Walker sings more naturally, with easier tones, Cleaver's shy, young-old voice is a reassuring presence beneath the music’s astral blanket. That they both sound overwhelmed by Forever Sounds’ vast scale is in fact the record’s saving grace; as ever, Wussy’s proximity to ordinariness is precisely what makes them lovable.
Correction: The original version of this review incorrectly stated Lisa Walker’s age when Wussy was formed.
