On their sophomore record, Wunderhorse deliver proof that every tune they hum turns to gold. Jacob Slater’s sweat-soaked intensity lurches from Cobain to Young just as a moth would flit between two guiding lights. Its gilded grunge sounds fresh from the stage, still honey-eyed and snarling.
The album’s lead single and eventual namesake ‘Midas’ comes one breath away from imploding with its own conviction. Slater’s vocals manage to sound raw yet assured and controlled – like graphite being expertly ground down for the sake of a brazen portrait. Through the swaggering guitars and percussion punches, you can almost see the sketch of a middle finger forming in shades of grey. It’s essentially an anthem for anyone the industry has treated as disposable. The songwriting itself is cripplingly intelligent boasting lines like, “the voice inside the suit came crawling down the telephone, somewhere between a chessboard and a nursery rhyme.” Performed in the way of a one-take live demo, you can practically hear them snaking across the desk toward some leech in a shirt and tie. In other words, it’s agonisingly convincing.
If ‘Midas’ was the bark, latest single ‘Rain’ is almost certainly the bite. A raucous chaser determined to sink into your skin. The clunky baselines could easily slide onto an early release by Fontaines DC while the words “do you feel the rain?” sharpen themselves against the beat. It’s garage punk, basement noise and festival weather. Energy you just can’t shake.
‘Emily’ however, plays more like an exposed bruise. Tender and toughening. From subtler beginnings than the previous two offerings, it appears to gather strength with every crashing cymbal. In a hybrid between shushed whimper and wrung-out cry, Slater proclaims “bad dreams, can’t keep ‘em out, there’s things I don’t talk about.” A pristine example that intensity is most effective when built up to an emotional gut-punch.
On the topic of a gut-punch, imagine the darkest parts of yourself held up like contorted shadow puppets. That effectively demonstrates how ‘Silver’ fits into the album. A perfectly twisted, amped up lullaby. The lead guitar feeds Nirvana through the air which is dripping with angsty confessions – “I was crooked from the cradle, I’m a bastard from the start, and I kept some pretty people in the hollow of my heart.” The type of tune you’d expect to hear at your local in the 90s as they ring out for last orders.
‘Arizona’, then, must be the late-night shuffle towards home. Gently competing layers of electric guitar skim across each other like cars on a headlight-stained freeway. Each syllable in Slater’s vocal performance is pulled right from the root, vowels that pierce and shatter the purr of traffic. “When it rains in Arizona and the desert flowers bloom, there’s a wind that blows to Boston and it sings the saddest tune.” When people say a city takes on a new personality at night, this song is that. A nocturnal microclimate in the middle of the album.
Elsewhere, ‘Superman’ bursts back into daylight. Beginning with what sounds like a crushed dial tone or the aftershock of a morning alarm, lyrics take on the huskiness of a voice being used for the first time that day. Chipping away slowly at a series of ambient chords, cymbals create a lightness previously unknown to this record. If you jumped at the right time, you’d swear you could take flight on it. It’s so delicately tear-inducing you have to wonder if it entered the album on that breeze that blew to Boston.
Seeking to change the pace, the industrial jolts of ‘July’ devastate any serenity ‘Superman’ left behind. It’s mechanical melody uses the electric guitar like gears that rust and roll over one another. A cranking machine that uses words as oil to keep things turning. Wunderhorse are no stranger when it comes to experimental guitar. In their live shows, tracks often bleed into each other as one riff reaches improvisationally for the next. You’re continuously watching four men in the shape of Telecasters.
In ‘Cathedrals’, a single riff is cracked open, splintering into dense percussion. If this intro were a visual, it’d be a sledgehammer to stained glass. Notes bursting to a mosaic. The elevation in the band’s production between this album and the last is evident. Whilst Slater started this as a solo project, it has recently turned into a collaborative effort with the change largely owing its life to live shows. It’s sort of like the part of a relationship where you accept you now come as a set. A package deal.
There’s a level of peace that stems from this realisation and lands right in the arms of penultimate track ‘Girl.’ For this first time this record, listeners are presented with a track that sounds so truly unburdened. The jagged edges have been sanded from the vocals and Slater even goes as far as to harmonise a “la la la.” There’s a budding desire that is so refreshing. An image of someone who’s imperfect but trying. The first love in an album full of divorce.
When it comes to parting ways, final track ‘Aeroplane’ seems to have perfected the art. It’s the album’s longest moment, resting comfortably at eight and a half minutes, and yet it never seems exhausted. Instead, it manages to feel so finalised whilst also sounding as if it’s being played for the very first time. You can picture each note being scribbled onto paper as quickly as it falls from the strings, lest the writer forget how it goes tomorrow. Its soft rock being rehearsed at the foot of the bed, tinkered with at the bottom of the garden on a splintered bench.
In either case, you can imagine the guitar bathed in the kind of gold light that breaks through curtains or leaves. Flawed acoustics flecked by the Midas touch.
Wunderhorse: Midas – Out 30th August 2024 (Communion Records)
