Wolf People took to the English countryside to make Fain, because Fain's the kind of record you make in the English countryside. The London foursome's second LP-- third, if you count their sturdy early singles collection Tidings-- harkens back to the days when fife-toting beardos decamped to hillsides to write 18-minute songs about wizards. Indeed, Fain, much like 2010's Steeple, is a progressive rock record of the most British kind: heady, overcast, rooted in English psych-folk, streaked with lightning-flash guitars, thunderous rhythms, and the occasional woodwind. More than anything, music like this is meant to be transportive; surely that's why so much of it came tucked in a triple-gatefold sleeves done up in dragons or dudes in pointy hats. And the shimmering chords of Fain opener "Empty Vessels" seem to draw the curtain back on another, promisingly strange little world. But Fain, for all its craggy hillsides and cameos from wizened sages, seems all too content to travel the very same paths of its predecessors without risking the same ridiculousness.
With its amped-up Brit-folk melodies, its pastoral bent, and its occasional flute, Fain, like Steeple before it, owes more than a little something to prog-blues progenitors/expert-level dungeonmasters Jethro Tull. A few softer moments recall less booming Tull contemporaries like Trees; on the heavier end, Fain crashes and bangs like Page and Bonham or Baker and Clapton. Where the fitfully satisfying, decidedly scatterbrained Tidings drew as much from boggy UK psych as it did San Francisco and swinging London, Fain holds onto those few strains of turn-of-the-70s UK rock awfully tight, narrowing its influences in an attempt to expand its scope. Fain does a good job of conjuring atmosphere: the production's crisp, the rhythms punchy, the tension in the air lending everything a certain queasiness. But once you've spent a little time traversing these pathways, you start to feel like you're going in circles.
Most of these songs begin with an explosion, guitar and drums pounding out a carefully calibrated assault. Soon after, frontman Jack Sharp's flickering candle of a voice takes the torch, intoning some far-away wisdom or recalling some long-ago scene. Then the guitars resume their upward climb, clawing their way to a peak of sorts before toppling into the next song. Taken on their own, Fain's constant guitar wig-outs can be electrifying, their blunt force untempered by their jagged complexity. But continually upending Sharp's verses with these fretboard detours leaves Fain feeling disjointed and sapped of its fluidity. Between these corkscrewing guitars, you'll catch glimpses of the world Sharp and company mean to conjure. But Fain thrashes about too much to ever quite come together the way an album like this is supposed to; as distraction-laden as most prog-rock is, Fain seems incapable of holding any one thought for very long without finding it necessary to solo all over it. The instrumental interplay is several clicks past competent, but after a few spins, you find yourself waiting not for particular songs, but individual moments: the way "Hesperus" seems to rise a few inches off the ground not quite halfway through, or that trippy little delay-click behind the main riff on "All Returns". The rest starts to feel a bit extraneous, interchangeable even, the riffs forced onto these tracks rather than built seamlessly into them.
The spiraling hook of "When the Fire is Dead in the Grate" provides Fain with its crowning moment. Over a crashing sea, Sharp recounts a horrific scene: a stormy night, a fire, and footprints in the ash. Yet Sharp-- or whoever he's giving voice to at the moment-- claims to have slept through the whole thing. True, Fain could certainly stand to lose a few of its momentum-sapping guitar blowouts. But what it really needs is more drama, something to elevate it beyond a few half-told tales of yore and a mess of guitars and drums chasing each other around a hillside. Fain clocks in just shy of 45 minutes, with no single track stretching out much past seven minutes, so even all the carefully choreographed guitar whizzbang is kept on a fairly short leash. Sharp's voice is lovely, but he's quite a mannered singer, rarely allowing himself to just go for it. So Fain, for all its geeky underpinnings, never quite seems at ease underneath that wizard cap. The blocky compositions and instrumental rigor certainly make Wolf People a prog band, but progressive? Not particularly. Between its out-of-town origins, its fusty linguistics, and its towering guitar throwbacks, Fain seems to want so desperately to be immersive, world-conjuring, the kind of record you break your weed up on. But by drawing this deeply on both the physical and sonic landscapes of their forebears, and with too many go-nowhere solos blotting out its songs, Fain winds up feeling stuck in time.
