“The Rising Tide” buzzes in on a breezy blast of distortion, its guitar lines flaring into droning dissonance, the drums crisp and minimal, the bass a subtle through-line in a deliriously murky roar. The sound filters Velvet Underground fuzz through the jangling exuberance of early R.E.M., and except for its fluttering, trebly vocals it could easily put you in mind of the Feelies. No coincidence there.
Indeed, Wild Carnation was one of an interlocking circuit of New Jersey bands that shared members—and a certain buzzy, drone-y, jangly aesthetic—with the Feelies. It formed around 1992, after the Feelies first hiatus and included Feelies bassist Brenda Sauter, her husband Rich Barnes and drummer Chris O’Donovan. (In terms of intricate interconnections, Sauter and Barnes already played together in Trypes, and they were also in Speed the Plough.)
This Record Store Day release collects the original songs from Wild Carnation’s first album, demo versions of seven of these 12 tracks and what looks like the entirety of a 1997 live gig in Hamburg, Germany. Thirty-one cuts in all, it provides a sweeping view of Wild Carnation’s early incarnation (there was another album called Superbus, some 12 years after the first). If the band was overlooked before, it is fully represented now.
And really, that’s a good thing, because there’s not a single dud on Tricycle. From the noise-addled propulsion of “The Rising Tide” straight through to the folk-picked intimacy of “Shaker Tune,” the main album cuts are uniformly engaging, and you get to hear them more than once, in various iterations.
For example, “Susquehanna 142,” a nod to the trains that crisscross Garden State sets up a hazy, mesh of intersecting guitar picking and lilting vocal descants. If you like that, and how could you not, the compilation provides additional context in the form of a barer, folkier demo and a pensive live version that brings out the tune’s dreamy side. Later, “The Lights are On (but No One’s Home)” blares and buzzes with feedback, a dirty crust under its careening, multi-voiced harmonies. A live performance brings the main melodic line to the front, emphasizing its hooky, poppy side and submerging the roar of amps.
The live cuts also provide a peek into Wild Carnation’s influences, with covers of Patti Smith, Neil Young and the sister band Speed the Plough. Barnes challenges the audience to name the band that wrote one of the most obscure covers, offering a free CD to anyone who gets it right. The CD goes unclaimed because even among the most ardent German audience, no one besides the band is very familiar with The Grass Roots. The song — “Wait a Million Years” — fits pretty neatly into Wild Carnation’s aesthetic, though, with sharp, power pop guitar licks, bashing rhythms and a melody that is both triumphant and minor-key melancholy.
You could certainly approach Tricycle as a Feelies side project, noting its similarities and thinking a lot about whether the music is better or worse. But this extended reissue argues for considering Wild Carnation on its terms, with stronger folk roots and careening, often thrilling vocal parts. Delmore will be putting out a similar package around Superbus in the fall, and even if it’s as long as this one, it seems like a pity that there wasn’t more.
Βάλε φωτιά σε ό,τι σε καίει, σε ό,τι σου τρώει την ψυχή Έξω οι δρόμοι αναπνέουν διψασμένοι, ανοιχτοί Είναι η αγάπη ένα ταξίδι από γιορτή σε γιορτή #Athens #night #carride #roads #headinghome #Trypes #NowPlaying (στην τοποθεσία Πανεπιστημίου)
Give ‘em credit; in 1986 the Feelies were a band with a very firm grasp of their own merits. There was not a guitar band in the land that could match the coiled tension and ecstatic release of their concerts. And while they weren’t exactly rich, not only were other people starting to score with a sound founded upon theirs, but one in particular — R.E.M.’s Pete Buck — was already eager to give back by co-producing their flawless second album, The Good Earth. Not for nothing had they put a picture on its cover of the band out standing in a field, har har.
But perfection isn’t everything, and right after making a record that clinched their mastery, they made another that expressed the concept of wabi-sabi. Who knows if they consciously embraced the beauty of imperfection, since they were a bunch of Jersey misfits, not Zen masters, but they sure found it when they made Shore Leave.
Yung Wu was the Feelies in all but name. The combo came into being at the tail end of rehearsals by the Trypes, a group from Haledon New Jersey that over time included more and more members of the Feelies. After playing their own songs, percussionist Dave Weckerman would pick up a guitar and lead them through a few classic rock covers. First they adopted a name that came from someone’s mispronunciation of a Chinese take-out dish. Then they started playing opening slots at Maxwell’s, the Hoboken joint that became home base for the Feelies, the dBs, and Yo La Tengo, who put a Yung Wu song on their first album. In 1987, a version of Yung Wu that was essentially the Feelies + Trypes/Speed The Plough keyboardist John Baumgartner recorded Shore Leave and Coyote Records pressed it up.
Weckerman’s wobbly warble is the crux of Yung Wu’s charm. While the Feelies’ lead singer, Glenn Mercer, has probably never sung a line that he wasn’t sure he could render in time and in tune, Weckerman fearlessly chases melodies into places his voice has never gone and probably never will. On “Spinning,” for example, he hits the ceiling of his upper register and breaks, and breaks again, and then tries to go even higher in the chorus. And on “Big Day,” a song by Brian Eno and Phil Manzanera, you can hear him shred his throat just a little bit every time he sings the words “crummy cosmetics.” But every time he gives it a go, you’re with him, hoping he’ll hit it even though you know he won’t. And this is no mere shamble-fest. Dave may be struggling, but the rest of the band is nailing it behind him as nervously and precisely as only the Feelies could, give him the just the heave-ho he needs to get the songs across.
The covers aren’t the only songs that merit such treatment. Instead of Mercer’s telegraphic outsider observations, Weckerman waxes loquacious and abstract. “The Empty Pool” seems to shift action from regular folks hanging out in a diner to a search over the open sea; “Aspiration” captures a moment of epiphany blotting out work-a-day tedium. Weckerman’s willingness to wind around the point rather than get to it spikes the songs with a mystery that’s given them legs sturdy enough to still be standing thirty years on. That’s how long it’s taken for this record to get turned into a CD (don’t worry, there’s an LP edition, too). And if the way-tardy embrace of a fading format isn’t enough wabi-sabi for one reissue, one has to ask why they didn’t give the bonus tracks (the two songs from Weckerman’s pre-Yung Wu solo single) a physical manifestation. C’mon, man, five more minutes? You’ve got the room. But what do you want, perfection?
