The one time I was asked what Wheat sounds like, my reply was “kinda like Bread, but more raw,” which was, admittedly, a smartassed response, but it makes sense if you think about it. Wheat is a band that religiously avoids structure and consequently evades being pigeonholed. The only consistent factor running through the group's five long players is inconsistency, and this can be both good and bad news. Wheat prefers to exist just outside the spectrum of typical pop. They’re raw in the sense that all the pop ingredients are there, but musically, it’s an ongoing experiment with the recipe. You’ve got your hooks, your sparkling guitar riffs, insidious melodies and equally infectious chorus-heavy vocals, but the ingredients never combine together in the same way. So Wheat sounds like, maybe not Bread, but think Beta Band or Menomena with the proclivity for weirdness that is common to the Animal Collectives and Grizzly Bears of the world. They sound like what Wilco probably sounded like to Wilco in their trippier early-aught years. Confused? Good, that means you’re ready for some Wheat.
“Half of the time, it’s total darkness; half of the time, I see the light and it shines.” Couldn’t have said it better myself. Track one hits the nail on the head. Whether you favor Per Second or Hope & Adams, about half of Wheat’s material strikes something of a discord. There’s a palpable hyper-consciousness of the diverging styles between the atmospheric and the more grounded melancholy riff-rock. For me, 2007’s Everyday I Said a Prayer for Kathy and Make a One Inch Square struck a perfect balance between the two. Wheat characteristically dodge predictability, and still manage to create some of the catchiest songs of the year. Musically, Kathy builds out, not up. There’s no pay-off, no inevitable surrender to the friendly confines of the radio-pop ditty. Instead, there are lyrical rounds, aimless not-quite-crescendos, and compounding yet fleeting rhythms, all encasing the inspiringly restrained lyrics. What Wheat lacks in accessibility, they make up for in provocative ingenuity.
So if you’re like me, a Kathy fan, White Ink Black Ink is almost exactly the album you’re hoping for. The sprawling songscapes are reined in a bit, for the most part, so the Per Second die-hards should be pleased as well. In fact, “Living 2 Die vs. Dying 2 Live” and “Music is Drugs” are almost, dare I say, radio-friendly? Wheat keeps us guessing, but even I’m a little surprised to say that the biggest draw back is the repetition. There’s less of the organic sensibility that made Kathy so successful, and made songwriter Scott Levesque’s repetitive tendencies work so well. Where Kathy tends to expand and contract, White Ink Black Ink leans more in favor of guileless expansion. “Baby in My Way” and “My Warning Song (Everything is Gonna Be Alright)” are clear-cut examples of the contraction deficit. Tracks like “I Had Angels Watching Over Me” and “Little White Dove” from Kathy push the atmospheric mysticism to near breaking points, but cycle back through musically sparse vocal rounds with cunning finesse. So, in a sense it’s more of a coherent array of songs, but at the same time, it lacks that invisible hand that kept Kathy so enticingly bewildering.
In the end, if you’re waiting for some sort of return to form, you will be disappointed. Wheat is in a state of constant conceptual evolution or flux. If there is any discernible form, then truly, Wheat has never departed. They will not be a band you rave about, but they are the band you will return to again and again when predictability is getting you down.
Track List:
1. Half Of The Time (2:27)
2. Changes Is (3:52)
3. My Warning Song (Everything Is Gonna Be Alright) (3:07)
4. El Sincero (2:56)
5. Living 2 Die Vs. Dying 2 Live (3:07)
6. If Everything Falls (2:50)
7. Music Is Drugs (4:41)
8. Coke And Tanqueray (0:31)
9. Two Mountains (3:41)
10. I Want Less (4:03)
11. Baby In My Way (2:07)
