Description
Wussy returns in May 2018 with their newest, darkest offering yet. With songs inspired by the “Fargo� TV show (Gloria), daredevil stunts and the atom bomb (One Per Customer), Charles Burns’s “Black Hole� (Tall Weeds, Cake, Black Hole) and seemingly endless months of incessantly bleak news cycles.
The writing duo of guitarists/vocalists Chuck Cleaver and Lisa Walker, with bassist Mark Messerly, drummer Joe Klug and pedal steel player John Erhardt, echo their Midwestern American landscape as a sustained drone, accented with jagged guitar, small rays of hope and a shimmering orchestration of cello, bowed bass and 70s synthesizer. And of course, noise... always noise.
Much of this album was written in the studio, including two tracks composed on-the-spot as the tape was left running (Black Hole, Firefly). In a departure for the group, the LP also includes two covers: 1977’s Aliens in Our Midst by cult Sacramento band The Twinkeyz, as well as a cover of singer-songwriter Kath Bloom’s wearily beautiful Oblivion.
The familiar Wussy touchstones are there - the same catch in the throat and swelling of the chest. Walker and Cleaver continue to cast a suspicious eye on their modern dystopian paradise. Finding themselves, as many of us are, presented with a divided world that too often draws eerie parallels to Charles Laughton’s “Night of the Hunter�. Singing the same hymn with our enemy. But... they remind us, we are in this together. Because as says Rachel Cooper, H.I. McDunnough and Sparklehorse, “It’s a hard world for little things.�