“Wilder Maker is a project where I push myself to try and reinvent and stretch the music you can make with a band that’s still fundamentally a few people playing instruments and singing, mostly live,” explained Gabriel Birnbaum of New York‘s Wilder Maker in an interview Jon did for The Rumpus back in 2019. “The goal is to make something that will surprise people musically as well as move them, and push the boundaries of the listeners.”
This playful and exploratory intention was clear on 2018’s Zion, a record they described as “the first chapter in a musical novel” that aimed to provide a multi-faceted portrait of life in Brooklyn. The band, namely Birnbaum, Nick Jost and Sean Mullins, plus long-time collaborator Katie Von Schleicher, captured a patchwork of emotions with stylistic diversity, throwing influences into a big bubbling pot and serving it steaming hot.
A lot has happened since then, including a further double single, a Birnbaum solo album, and something of a creative existential crisis (something Gabriel talks about at length in The Rumpus piece), not to mention the general global chaos of the last few years. But despite all that, Wilder Maker have returned with a brand new record, Male Models, on Western Vinyl. An album that can be viewed as the second chapter of that musical novel and a very clear sign that Birnbaum is still committed to reinventing indie rock through a plural, diverse sound.
If Zion achieved this via a diversity of styles, Male Models pushes further. Because although the ostensible lead, Birnbaum in fact provides lead vocals on barely half of the songs. The rest are lead by guest vocalists, with Katie von Schleicher returning on several tracks along with appearances from Felicia Douglass (of Dirty Projectors and Ava Luna), Alex Schaaf (aka Yellow Ostrich), V.V. Lightbody, Mutual Benefit and even Adam Duritz of Counting Crows fame. If the two main aims of Wilder Maker are to stretch music beyond the conventions of the traditional rock band and evoke the multiplicity of urban life, then this feels like the logical progression. Open up the band to outside influences. Conjure a chorus of voices by becoming the chorus itself.
This range of voices and genre-bending style means Male Models sometimes feels like the work of more than one band, a comment on the shuffled musical diet of the masses in the age of $potify and giant Youtube playlists. It’s something Birnbaum was conscious of, even encouraged, and which plays into the overarching atmosphere. That shifting, slightly wild vibe of a party where dancing and good times denature into drunken fights and vomit and the inevitable gnaw of dawn-time melancholy. “We all listen to playlists a lot, even us album diehards,” explains Birnbaum, “I’ve been keeping an ever-expanding playlist of songs that I never want to skip, with all of these different voices back to back. I wanted to make a record that sounded like a playlist in this way; it became a kind of songwriting challenge for me.”
Album opener ‘Letter of Apology’ (a song that has been part of the Wilder Maker live set for a while) conjures just such a party in four and a half minutes, written in the shame-soaked aftermath of a particularly bad night. “I’m sorry I was late to your party where everyone was so effortless,” it begins, “I was starting at a wall for no discernible reason counting all the thumbtack holes.” From there our narrator goes on to become the centre of attention for all the wrong reasons—bumming cigarettes, throwing up on the bathmat, making a scene in front of the other guests.
I’m sorry that I told your sister’s boyfriend he was history’s greatest monster
And got up on a chair and announced to the party that we were all living in a fiction
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The song plays as the introduction to the album. A recognisable face in the crowd which signals what to expect from the evening, before melting back into the pack as the focus shifts and other protagonists emerge. But even as we move onto the following tracks, voiced by Felicia Douglass and Mutual Benefit in turn, there’s little doubt whose party we’re at. Because the real triumph is how Birnbaum incorporates the various personalities while preserving whatever it is which makes the Wilder Maker sound his own. The collaborators not just guesting on the record but buying into it completely, ensuring the soul of the project remains intact. The songs’ sardonic humour and existential angst, the population of broken characters and unreliable narrators who call them home.
Take ‘Oh Anna’, where Duritz’s familiar vocals simmer with barely concealed venom, taut and terse despite the warm simplicity of the chorus. “I had the immense and surreal privilege of going to record Adam Duritz on lead vocals at his apartment,” Birnbaum explains. “He understood the song completely and delivered it with the serrated edge the lyrics demand.” This commitment to the vision births a character complete with their own situation and history, introducing them so vividly you sense they’ve always lived in Birnbaum’s doom-laden world, regardless of whether we’ve happened upon them previously.
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With this established, the question is then just one of where Birnbaum decides to take us, and the answer, it seems, is just wherever he fancies. Smooth pop jams (‘A Professional)’ and electrified indie rock (‘All Power Must Remain Hidden’, ‘5 Train’) sit alongside melancholy piano ballads (‘Jason’) and elegantly lyrical indie pop (‘New Anxiety’). A standout is the Katie von Schleicher-led ‘Silver Car’, a country-tinged swayer which plays wishful desires against lurking instability, a heady mix doomed to crash upon the rocks of physical reality. “Another year of economy cars / Corpse crumpled on the side of the iron divide,” she sings. “There’s not enough coffee in the county to keep me safe from my own mind.” The song captures the record’s mood as well as any other. Dreaming that motion might prove the key to escape, even if that motion is nothing but the ceaseless orbit of the same old world.
Male Models is out now via Western Vinyl. Get it from the Wilder Maker Bandcamp page.
