“Dreaming that motion might prove the key to escape, even if that motion is nothing but the ceaseless orbit of the same old world.” That’s how we described the spirit of Wilder Maker‘s 2022 full-length Male Models, a multifaceted record which not only shuffled through a series of styles and influences across its runtime but also invited a number of guests (from Felicia Douglass and Mutual Benefit to Adam Duritz, Yellow Ostrich, V.V. Lightbody and Katie Von Schleicher) to lend their voices too. Think of a party hosted by lead Gabriel Birnbaum but populated by an array of characters, each taking a turn centre stage, allowing their stories to unfold and intersect in the way of a polyphonic novel. “The collaborators not just guesting on the record but buying into it completely,” as we continued, “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.” And with this cycle of voices the sense of movement only grew, each searching for a more prominent position in the room or else a way to escape it entirely. For a way to progress beyond the present towards something new.
Wilder Maker’s forthcoming album The Streets Like Beds Still Warm is a very different record to Male Models. One even more ambitious in scope (it’s the first of a planned triptych to be released across the next eighteen months) and unique in its creation which nevertheless seems driven by the spirit of its predecessor. As though the band itself was one such figure looking to move and progress and reach for something different. Birnbaum has called The Streets… “the inverse of the typical songwriter record,” the music recorded during open-ended sessions where core band members Adam Brisbin, Nick Jost, Sean Mullins improvised and swapped instruments at will, and guests including Katie Von Schleicher, Joseph Shabason, Macie Stewart, Chuck Johnson, Will Shore, Rebecca el-Saleh (Kitba) and Cole Kamen-Green added their own touches too, before Birnbaum took the result home and slowly whittled it into the form it takes today.
The result, made possible by both a band now experienced in working together and a label in Western Vinyl willing to trust them, swaps the sleek psych and goodtime rock sensibilities of its predecessor for something altogether more stark and lonely, less a house party than a late-night wander through unfamiliar streets. Which is not to suggest minimalism, the sound owing much to experimental and alt-jazz forebears, but rather the presiding mood. One indebted to the shadow and subtle desperation of noir cinema, the perfect soundtrack as Birnbaum’s worldweary narrator flits between bars and hospital rooms while nursing concerns both trivial and existential.
The trilogy of albums promises to chart an entire night in the city, with The Streets Like Beds Still Warm taking us from dusk to sometime after midnight. And the style makes good on the form. These are songs free from traditional structures but never sprawling. Ambiguous and often hypnotic but governed by linear motion. A path down which we follow the protagonist, watching as he moves through the night and the night moves through him, his own character and state of mind shifting as the hours slide on by. “Film noir detectives always start out looking immaculate, but by the end of the film they have a torn collar, a black eye, their slacks are stained, and they’ve started slapping people around in desperation,” Birnbaum says. “Are they the good guy anymore? I find this fascinating and I love the visual cues reflecting the internal landscape.”
With the album set for release in September, Wilder Maker have unveiled the two opening tracks as singles. Listen to ‘Strange Meeting with Owls’ and ‘Skewered by the Daystar’ below and take your first few steps into what will be a long night indeed.
The Streets Like Beds Still Warm will be released on the 19th September via Western Vinyl and you can pre-order it now from the Wilder Maker Bandcamp page.
Photo by Keegan Grandbois