If you're looking for the musical equivalent of four howling women on a mean, smoke-pluming bulldozer, blasting through house and storefront alike, Wild Flag is a band for you. Their self-titled debut is both a soul-shaking and oddly tender experience that leaves you constantly scanning the horizon for the band's next swing around on their audio-dozer express. It's an energy that few bands these days can seem to match - not just in the powerful growl of their guitars or the reckless tempo shifts or the schizophrenic vocal delivery, but in the way these ladies apply the intricacies of melody, invention and texture.
Featuring a line-up of '90s indie rock darlings (Sleater-Kinney, the Minders and Helium) the ladies of Wild Flag are well-practiced in their craft. After years of juggling projects, shifting members, forays into other media (Carrie Brownstein and Portlandia), Wild Flag finally emerged from the chaos back in 2011, with a record to match. The immediacy and, perhaps desperation, felt on their debut points to a sense of ultimate release, a sonic boom of creative energy that had been building up for years and years.
The opening blast of love-struction, "Romance", sets the tone quite nicely. With it's slightly detuned guitar chords jittering on and off, singer/guitarist Brownstein offers a rubbery barrage of earnest desires and admissions. Though it's never clear who she's talking about, she is singing in the personal "my" but also the collective "we", so you get the sense that the band was in full support of the song's message. She sings lines like , "Hey, you fill up the spaces, those empty places/the corners and cracks/you kill my sickness, my only witness/you're all that I have" and "We love the sound, the sound is what found us/sound is the blood between me and you". For me, "Romance" stands as a defiant optimism for love in the face of an increasingly cynical world, with music to glue us together. Or just loving music. Or both. I can definitely get behind any of those sentiments.
"Something's Come Over Me" tones things down just a little bit, shifting their dozer into second gear, with measured guitar notes and singer/guitarist Mary Timony's gentle, reassuring delivery. Timony sings of anxiety, "Something's coming over me/got a fever now/I can't breathe" and "Let me ask your advice/if I fall once/will I fall twice?", with music to cure what ails, "Oooh, oooh, oooh, I hear you comin' through my stereo". The song is quickly followed by a hard thrust forward into "Boom" and the stop-start epicness of "Glass Tambourine".
Throughout the album, you can tell the ladies atop their bulldozer are choosing their targets carefully. Once sighted, it's only a matter of choosing whether to crush it with love, cheekiness or resentment. Sometimes all three at once. "Future Crimes", with it's distorted keyboard melody, yearns for an end to some severe hypocrisy. Brownstein wails over and over, "if you're gonna be a restless soul/then you're gonna be so, so tired/if you're gonna give up on this fight/then i'm gonna call you a liar", cementing the idea that the band, despite their rip-roaring veneer, can be achingly sincere. "Racehorse" is a great use of humor to critique the pitfalls of greed. With a smart-assed confidence, Brownstein sings, "I'm a racehorse/yeah, I'm a racehorse/put your money on me", followed by a purposefully crass chorus, "we're in the money, we're in the money".
The band see's no point in making their delivery any different, regardless of the sentiment behind it. Every emotion is a force to be reckoned with. Perhaps the song that best encapsulates this is "Short Version". From the off-hand guitar flourishes to the intense drum fills, you can tell the ladies are cackling loudly as they doze around, kicking their legs off the side in joyful reverie of their destruction. Brownstein yowls off enigmatic phrases like, "Inside this stillness is a wave/a force from which we cannot be saved" and "Inside this heaven is a hell/under this fever we are well".
Eventually, one of the guitars gets stuck on a particularly juicy chord, repeating it over and over, as the other begins to fly high, arpeggiating notes until the cows come home. The band yells in unison, "Okay! Alright!", bringing this soiree of pure energy to it's boiling point. Wild Flag's audio-dozer has shifted to full speed and you can't help but gleefully hang on for dear life. And that's true of the entire album. It's a rough, gratifying ride through the passions of life, navigated by earnest and vibrant women. That's a trip I will gladly take for years to come.
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