Wye Oak – If Children

As soothing as dipping your feet into a warm bath on a cold summers day, ‘If Children’’s opening track ‘Please Concrete’ sets the scene for what is to follow during the following 45 minutes. A metronome steady beat, gently fingerpicked chords and delicate, warm keyboards augment the porcelain clear vocals. Then two minutes in Wye Oak explode like a firework into a squall of noise, bells and feedback before dipping back to it’s humble starts. ‘Warning’ follows up in a fuzzy vein, using noise as a melodic tool rather than ever letting it spill out without a purpose, rocking drums paying perfect accompaniment to the slowcore guitars swooning in and out- there is more than a little of Yo La Tengo at their peppiest at play here. That such a swell of noise can be created by just two people is impressive in itself.While vocalist/guitarist Jenn Wasner provides the icy clean female vocal, it falls to vocalist/drummer Andy Stack to provide the warmer more folky side of things, as evidenced on the pretty fingerpicked ’Regret’, all harmonica and swooshing cymbals. ‘Archaic Smile’ is a Floyd-esque daydream that sees Stack and Wasner duet, while ‘Family Glue’ adds ferocious strings to the mix, and a weary vocal. ‘I Don’t Feel Young’ follows the same delicate route that ‘Please Concrete’ had started down earlier in the record, the guitars and warm rush building at the halfway point, Wasner and Stack combining their vocals with a tambourine, an insistent chug on the guitar and a Phil Spector drum beat for good measure. A wall of sound indeed.Although fully embracing the warm fuzz and swooning noise of shoegaze, Wye Oak have succeeded where so many bands have failed due to their inherent sense of melody. While many acts have been tempted to wrap their music in ever increasing layers of noise untilall signs of vocals and tunefullness have been obliterated, Wasner and Stack have kept the song structure and tunefulness to the fore, and it has shown them to have a certain degree of subtly that is to their credit. It also allows their more folksy element to shine through, as it does on ‘A Lawn to Mow’.While not all the songs here can match the immediate quality of ‘Warning’ or ‘Please Concrete’ the only real mis-step here is the piano led ‘Keeping Company’, which has a theatricality that feels at odds with the humble approach elsewhere on the record. The likes of Efterklang and Lavender Diamond have had greater success with similar ideas. That this should be the only minor mistep from a debut album from an act that are still so young (neither Stack nor Wasner have yet to hit the wrong side of 23) is impressive. Hopefully the fact that this is a reissue (the album was originally self released in 2007 when the band were still going by the name ‘Monarch’) means that we will be hearing more material from the band in the very near future. 81%