Wye Oak
If Children
(Merge, 2008)

As our modern era proves again and again, the smallest things on earth are often the most important ones. DNA, CO2, ones and zeroes, they’re all pivotal forces in the infinitely complex storm that is our world. It’s therefore easy to understand how, for such a small band, Wye Oak seems to have considerable interest in things of imposing natural majesty. Formerly named Monarch (could be ruler by divine right, could be a butterfly), the band now takes its name from what was once the biggest white oak tree in the US. Before its destruction in a hurricane in 2002, the Wye Oak was Maryland’s state tree, a sprawling, centuries-old, 96-foot-tall giant of an oak tree, whose trunk alone weighed over 30 tons. To hear the wind rustling through the leaves of its incredible branches must have been one of nature’s finest choirs to behold. Wye Oak the band is just two people from Baltimore, but their songs do come and go in sweeping gusts, and their sound often strives for the majestic.

On If Children, Wye Oak’s first album, Jenn Wasner and Andy Stack split instrumental duties, though live they split only the vocals as Wasner plays guitar and Stack drums and plays keyboard. If Children was recorded during the fall and winter of 2006, but written “over the course of many years playing music—together and separately,” as the Wye Oak website states. The latter part of that statement is the most revealing, as a separation of songwriters would explain the variety of styles on the album. While not a weakness per se, it’s clear that Wye Oak is a fresh band with a wide scope that has yet to really hit its most cohesive stride. Songs vacillate from the pared-down to the grandiose, from treble-drenched gazer-pop to swaggering barroom rock. “Orchard Fair” revels in the band’s dominant mode of vast guitars, driven melody, and mighty smashes. Coupled with some drawn-out, bent guitar notes, here the Oak recalls the Swirlies as well as the more rockin’, younger side of Yo La Tengo. “I Don’t Feel Young” equally embraces Wye Oak’s rock roots with shoegaze influence slid to the fore, wrapping its sprawling guitar–charged melody into a sort of ’60s pop-shaped package at the end, not unlike the Jesus and Mary Chain were wont to do back in the day.

After the album’s similarly rockin’ two opening numbers comes “Regret”, which features but a single acoustic guitar, cymbal washes, some single-note harmonica whine, and twinkling piano in the background. Its quick tempo keeps its minimal instrumentation from seeming as stark as to represent a shift for its own sake, though it does frisk unexpectedly lightly in comparison to its two heavy-set predecessors. “Regret” fits in with the other mode vying for attention on the album: Its folk-rock element. “Family Glue” brings in some heavy strings and steady bass with Nastasia-strength vocals, while “Keeping Company” swims completely submerged in gorgeous pianos and gushing cymbals alongside a rickety, folk drum-set of sleigh bells, rim shots, and muted high-hat.

While by and large they all remain within the sound of one band, songs also differ enough as to be clearly the work of different songwriters, or at least different songwriting phases. Where it all comes together most movingly is the title song, “If Children Were Wishes.” It begins minimally with low guitar and piano, and builds into a sorry anthem awash in guitar noise and sweeping vocal harmonies. Wasner, with weary fortitude, sings lyrics of folly and fatalism, addressing the fruitlessness of a dying parent’s projections upon the lives of children that are themselves caught up in the well-intentioned pitfalls of their own straight-line lives. Wasner’s tone implies (to these ears anyway, and in a more constructive tone) that we lay down our fates out of lazily presumed helplessness rather than act upon the possibility of having control. “And so I suppose this is just how it goes, and no matter how I try,” sings Wasner, “I just have to watch you get weaker and weaker ‘til you finally die.” Wishing your dying mother would live forever is futile, just as your mother’s wishes for you to fulfill goals that she never could may be futile. But just because death is inevitable, one’s entire life needn’t be the wash it becomes in pursuit of the “impossible” goals set by one’s mother, or the world for that matter. Fatalism is to imagine you have no choice but to follow these paths of futility, and when your mother lies dying before you, it’s harder than ever to abandon those paths. Somewhere you know you have a choice, but by imagining you don’t, your reluctant choice has been made. It’s an earnest, dramatic, and powerfully beautiful song, the likes of which are rare and the very existence of which thankfully undermines its bleakness.

So it looks like Baltimore is just teeming with expansive co-ed pop-rock duos these days. Who knew? While Wye Oak’s trebly crash of guitar and cymbals sets it far apart from the sleepier, organ-rich dream-pop of their turf-mates, so does its need to bring its disparate musical ideas more cohesively into focus. A year or two of touring and writing together ought to solve that, however, and soon enough Wye Oak will doubtless be no less flooded with accolades as their hometown peers. If Children is certainly a testament to that possibility.

Listen: Various Tracks [at myspace.com]

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