Vertigo

The West, to quote the Lizard King, is the best. In the years since Jim Morrison committed that bit of boosterism to wax, the synecdoche between a few hundred miles of California coast and our whole hegemonic civilization has only become more darkly involved. Thankfully, this same ballyhooed complex of energy, spectacle, and violence offers a handy template for processing ongoing developments on its political, aesthetic, and psychic frontiers: aptly, the Western.

Vertigo, Wand’s sixth studio album, is undoubtedly a Western—albeit in the contemporary style. Like the cinematic interpretations by Monte Hellman and Jim Jarmusch, it’s a meditation on inner frontiers, where borders constrict, identities shift, and maps go blank. Once upon a time, the Los Angeles quartet excelled at music fit for touring Mulholland Drive on research chemicals. Vertigo, by contrast, beats its vagabond retreat to the desert—to a Llano del Rio or Spahn Ranch of the mind. Its pleasures, consequently, are furtive and indirect, scattering like reptiles from an overturned stone.

At the heart of Vertigo is not a narrative so much as fugitive guideposts through life’s fractured final cycle. From out of a haze of electric guitar texture, opener “Hangman” shuffles the mandala mid-tempo that will sustain much of the album. Frontman Cory Hanson’s voice is somber, shell-shocked; the tale a sketch without fixed subject or object. “Somebody’s trying to disappear/I guess I will find out/I’m gonna see you here tomorrow/I’m gonna be left out…” A dream before dying or the memory of a blackboard guessing game? The hangman carries out his sentence, but he also eases us on our way. In this sludgy fever’s subsidence, extended coda “Curtain Call” suggests a soul’s ascent, its destination still uncertain.

Vertigo, too, emerges from a moment of uncertainty for the band. A four-year recording hiatus saw the departures of keyboardist Sofia Arreguin and founding bassist Lee Landey. Hanson, in the meantime, notched two formidable solo albums (recorded with help from Wand guitarist Robbie Cody and new bassist Evan Backer) whose energetic blend of folk, power pop, and progressive rock threatened intermittently to eclipse the main event. Ever resilient, Wand have conscientiously retooled their sound, crafting songs that seem excavated instead from the kind of cosmic post-rock improvisations first teased on 2022’s live album Spiders in the Rain. The result is a second debut of sorts, an act of self-definition in negative, at once a settling in and a shearing away.

Gone is their past material’s giddy, lysergic bounce; instead, drummer Evan Burrows pours a spacious, continual foundation where melodies rise through repetition, and rich details (with string and wind arrangements courtesy of Backer) slither and swim. The members of Wand would probably be first to acknowledge that this is ambitious stuff—something akin to the tabula rasa of Pygmalion or Spirit of Eden, a whole of metamorphic parts—and thus not without pitfalls. The glistening, incantatory back half of “JJ” must still overcome a somewhat muddled takeoff. Elsewhere, atmospheres can linger indistinctly; at length, you come to miss Hanson’s mischievous persona and the old band’s monster-movie licks.

Vertigo is not all evasion, however. Clouds part around lead single “Smile,” which revels in the band’s easy-riding FM radio influences, scanning for a frequency of longing to cut through our sketch-like desperado’s fatigue. And “High Time,” built from a percussive feedback pulse, seemingly from the top floor down, cascades into a deliriously layered sturm und drang, receding again in a vapor trail of strings and static, headed for the sunset.

But the essence of Vertigo remains defiantly (even frustratingly) in the eerie, interlinked soundworld designed around its peaks. Closer “Seaweed Head” stamps a mystic image on a twilit anti-climax, its flickerings the closest approximation of vertigo itself—the false perception of movement in stillness. “Find it really hard to see the ray/Got you green upside down in the month of May/Someone’s gonna tell you there’s nothing left to hide/Someone’s gonna bring you back through the other side…” Of course, the pervasiveness of motion is a scientific truth, and a spiritual one as well. Whether what awaits our hanged man is revelation, or some return to the primordial source, no one is saying. Vertigo is a welcome return for one of our most fascinating bands, in L.A. or anywhere else. That they’ve arrived with seemingly nothing to lose only heightens anticipation for what’s still to come.