On their latest album Laughing Matter, west coast psych-wizards Wand channel Radiohead in a way we've never heard from them before, especially on today's featured track "Scarecrow."
"Yeah, I will say, at a certain point, Radiohead was a major presence in my listening life — those records changed the way I listened to records," founding member Evan Burrows admitted in a recent Reddit AMA. "However, that was about 15 years ago now, and I don't listen to them very intently anymore. I definitely respect how they don't seem to have compromised their approach or attitude toward reality and the whole business, in spite of becoming insanely popular. Anyway, yeah — I don't think it's entirely off base to make that connection on certain songs, at certain moments, but i think the comparison is being massively overstated. It's definitely a hivemind thing, and a general lack of imagination in music writing thing." (Touché, Mr. Burrows!) They add, "A lot has changed. I think we are just better at being in a band and as things have grown with us musically."
Via a press release, the band describe the album as "a record about love in a time of terror; it calls you down from panic room labyrinths, to work the deep tissue of unraveling trauma we all carry so dear. The 15 songs on this record face their energy outward, to take with you through a common world that can't suffer its human abusers much longer. Laughing Matter encourages you to shake hands with your old demons, to lay your pathologies to rest, to hold your spirit close, and let your body do what's next."
Laughing Matter is out now via Drag City Records. Watch the music video, directed by Gordon De Los Santos, below. KEXP presents Wand on Tuesday, October 15th at the Showbox, opening for Stereolab.
