K Records-- the standard-bearer of all things touchy and feely-- is an apt home for the almost pathologically earnest Jason Anderson. In interviews, he's perennially enthusiastic about unexceptional people and places; about the joys of music for trains, campfire songs, and handholding sing-alongs. His is the rare personality where a Zen-like awareness of the sanctity of the moment, an unremitting gratitude for the gift of existence, and an ostensibly genuine capacity to love strangers are combined into a sort of super-empathy that verges on the grotesque. This deep-seated sensitivity courses sweetly through Anderson's music, which pulls no punches in its pursuit of the bittersweet: Only one song, "I Was Wrong", actually has a doleful harmonica, but you can almost hear those spectral strains tacitly bleating over the others.
"Spectral" is the watchword for The Wreath, which is all about the phantom distance between memory and experience. Anderson is concerned with cataloging what's been lost, what's left behind, and what never was; and with trying to hew meaning from the tropes that float aimlessly through these void spaces. On "O, Jac!", a slow-burning lament flickering over a handful of guitar and piano chords, the symbolic language is articulated: an albatross, a bracelet, a noose, a millstone, "a weird heavy amulet of expectation," ghost weights that alchemically transmute the heart from flesh to lead. Like most of the album's more winning songs, it achieves its peak force in its transition from simple quietude to shuddering incandescence, as Anderson trades impassioned cries of "Where are you?" with guest vocalist Rachael Jensen.
"If I'm Waiting" finds Andersen "slowly embracing the concept of you as a ghost", a "never-was and never-will", as he returns from the thrift store "to tear through the caller ID". This is another guitar and piano number embellished with elegiac brass-- ever since Anderson dropped his Wolf Colonel moniker and became self-titled, he's veered away from Guided By Voices style indie rock and toward emo-folk in the vein of Bright Eyes, David Dondero, and Son, Ambulance, all of whom he evokes with remarkable fidelity, down to his confessional / narrative lyrics, his occasional ventures out of key, his penchant for crescendos, swooning blue notes, and febrile vocal vibratos.
But in music so intent on preserving the past, nothing can truly disappear, and the old Wolf Colonel still rears his head on lo-fi rockers like "Citizen's Arrest" and "Our Winter". If it seems odd that someone so attuned to joy sings such gloomy songs, consider what it means to truly love the world and to live with the knowledge that it will all be spirited away. The friction between bliss and the inevitability of bliss's end lies at the heart of The Wreath, a pasteboard carton filled with dog-eared books, a shabby scarf, an unlabelled mix tape, and a sheaf of yellowing letters, holding fast to its secrets in the corner of a bare room. This is mo(u)rning music, where hope and bereavement collide.
