Some music springs forth fully formed, some shows the work within. The Louder I Call, the Faster It Runs, Wye Oak’s latest album for Merge, does both. The Baltimore duo’s sixth full-length begins with 36 seconds of ethereal “(tuning)” before plunging into waves of buoyant, spritely pop with a folkie soul. The results are at once triumphant and surprisingly haunting, given the warm, buzzing synths, raggedly ascendant lead guitar, propulsive keys and jubilant percussion. It’s a big sound to harness, but Jennifer Wasner (vocals, keys, acoustic and electric guitar) and Andy Stack (keys, percussion) deliver the requisite expansive performance with confidence.
Track two, “The Instrument”, pours out over lush, undulating layers of synthesizer and affected guitar. This exultant vortex — a touchstone throughout the album — has a precedent in the warm, humming swirl of Michael Angelakos’ early odes as Passion Pit, though Wye Oak presents a stronger, more nuanced palette. Wasner’s compressed, articulate vocal winds up and down alongside a persistent, agitated drum kit, setting the stage for an album-long sense of chaos brought to heel and then harnessed. The opening lyric, “suffering / I remember suffering,” fits this sense of a trauma outrun but not forgotten. Later, on “Say Hello”, a plane ride allows Wasner to mull the beliefs and distractions, performances and codes that dominate terrestrial life — all of which, given some celestial distance, tumble meaninglessly off the earth’s slow, enduring turn. The album’s soaring sound often gives the impression of gleeful personal sovereignty, but songs like the transitory “Say Hello” and earlier, the interrogative “Lifer” ground that joy in the helplessness or sorrow that preceded and perhaps produced it.
“It Was Not Natural” steps in on piercing strings and resonant piano chords. It features Wasner’s most elastic vocals, evoking both Annie Clark’s opaque nostalgia on early St. Vincent records and Jenny Lewis at her most whimsical. Like Clark and Lewis, Wasner and Stack have a knack for injecting subtle tension into their least demanding sound structure to ensure an edge without resorting to outright abrasion. The tension in “It Was Not Natural” mostly resides in the lyrical preoccupation with “human hate” (pronounced, I’d guess not unintentionally, like “human nature”) while the music pulses and blooms with Stack’s bubbling smorgasbord of bass and effects.
On the other hand, “Symmetry,” the next track, dips right into the miasma. The song roils on crumpled guitar and an enveloping crash of cymbals and bass drum to fortify Wasner’s vicious, unsettling vocal. When she delivers the anodyne refrain, “symmetry is so / appealing,” sparks practically spurt from her throat to your ears. The effect is ultimately cleansing, as the screeching, scrambled blips that crumble “Symmetry” to its conclusion are reborn as the flittering, minimal strings that accompany her hymnal reemergence on “My Signal”. This interconnectedness creates a deeply immersive if shrouded listening experience, as if the album is following a definite storyline that still tantalizingly eludes comprehension.
Sonically, The Louder I Call, the Faster It Runs is a match for pleasantly oppressive summer afternoons. The undercurrents, however, flow from spring’s rebirths, realizations and, especially, the enduring worry that the winter chills haven’t quite passed. The surface of this album bursts with affirmation and vigor, while the substance retains a healthy respect for the chronic struggle to maintain that vitality.