Anyone familiar with Wilder Maker will know they are a band ambitious in scope and human in concern, employing a diverse sound and detailed style to fully capture life on the ground in Brooklyn, New York. Last year’s Zion signalled a complete realisation of this ideal, viewed by lead writer Gabriel Birnbaum as the first chapter of a musical novel that will map his bustling milieu. Along with collaborators Katie Von Schleicher, Nick Jost (Baroness), Adam Brisbin (Sam Evian, Jolie Holland) and Sean Mullins, Birnbaum’s polyphonic creation was a rich and nuanced city of its own, sweeping the casual listener into its trash-scented warmth and leaving a plenitude of breadcrumbs for the obsessives and paranoiacs to pick over.
Wilder Maker are back with a double single that picks up where the album left off, adding new layers to the environment it brought to life. “To me both songs are sort of an extension of the Zion universe,” Birnbaum explains. “For example, the character “Cal” appears in ‘Rose Room’ and he’s also the character that the narrator is talking to in ‘Cocaine Man’ off the LP. I like the idea of the same characters reappearing over and over so that I can create a whole universe that’s full of its own connections and clues and locations, the way some authors do.”
First track ‘Love So Well’ is a slow shake of a country song emanating from the aftermath of a relationship, a still, wistful space created when your dreams slide from the canvas and through the cracks in the floor. However, as Von Schleicher’s warm croon suggests, the experience is not entirely unpleasant, something in the fresh air and blank space possessing a soothing effect, as though love was but a fever dream that breaks upon dawn, reduced to flashes of heat and light that haunt the morning air.
As the light falls from my face
All my history is outpaced I find
A new peace of mind
headlights start to dot the lanes
I could be anyone
I aim my future with my hands
I am no one now
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Casting itself into the demented world we call our own, ‘Rose Room’ is rock strung out and noodling, shot through with an electric frisson that might be exhilaration or rising dread. How do we keep our heads, the song asks, when our environment is so manic and strange? How can faith in a prevailing good persevere in a place like this? The questions are followed not by blind hope or nihilistic despair but rather a queasy sense of purpose, the vertiginous realisation that there’s no benevolent or correcting force driving home the importance of one’s own actions, with just a thin line of chance and happenstance between survival and ruin.
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Love So Well / Rose Room is out now via Northern Spy Records and you can get it from the Wilder Maker Bandcamp page.