In the small-town Baptist churches of my youth, it was not uncommon to hear
preachers talk about people who were "drunk with the spirit." The idea was
that you could become so overwhelmed with the experience of God that you
would become a little goofy — giving away possessions, speaking in
tongues, perhaps even singing a little... without the hymnal or Wurlitzer
accompaniment, just because it felt like the right thing to do. I never
observed this personally. My fellow churchgoers were pretty tightly
controlled, unimaginative people. But I imagine being drunk with the
spirit would sound a lot like Wooden Wand & the Vanishing Voice, a
freewheeling drone-folk collective that takes its religion seriously, but
in a tipsily euphoric way that has nothing to do with sitting still in a
church pew.
Wooden Wand are an enormously productive musical organization, cranking out
fuzzily mesmeric recordings every few weeks or so. For a band that most
people started hearing about this year or last, its discography is already
daunting, starting with dozens of hard-to-find cassettes and leading up to
this last year's four-CD burst of label-blessed prolificness. (In 2005,
WW reissued Xiao, Buck Dharma and Harem of the Sundrum
Ladies, launched this new one, The Flood, and put the final
touches on Gipsy Freedom, which is out on 5RC.)
The Flood has six cuts, three of them the long hallucinatory
meditations familiar from Xiao, and three more contained,
traditional folk-blues songs. The more extended songs are the most
transformative, leading the listener through extended dreamscapes of bent
folk-centric tones. The opener, "Snake Earl" explores oddly tuned acoustic
finger-picking for more than half of its 10-minute length, before Satya
Sai's pure, mystic voice breaks through. She sounds a bit like Katie
Eastburn from Young People, moving smoothly from lullaby sweetness to wild
keening drama, and she gives the piece some needed structure. The title
cut comes next, its ritual drone reinforced by deep-toned percussion and
squealing, feverish violins. The words are chanted here, rather than sung,
warning about a coming catastrophe that will drown out the world. There's
something disturbing about this cut, the equanimity with which the band
intones words like "This kingdom's due to drown," the otherness of the
notes coaxed from guitar and strings. It is bug-eyed weird and internally
consistent, frightening and fascinating at the same time.
The next three songs are, relatively speaking, bite-sized and
accessible. None last more than four minutes and all belong to
recognizable folk and blues traditions. The first "(I Wanna Live on)
Sunbeam Creek" is flat-out beautiful, a succession of long-hanging acoustic
guitar chords left to float on sunlight air. "Dogpaddlin' Home in Line
With My Lord" is similarly simple and affecting. There's a suggestion of
gospel in its grand upsweeping chorus of "I've been away from your
house/ Way too long" and an unembarrassed, appealing affirmation of faith
in its images. You don't often think of a believer dogpaddling his way to
righteousness, but in Wooden Wand's hands, the metaphor seems concrete and
real rather than silly. The last of these shorter songs, "Lifetime of the
Season (Interlude)" is straight Delta blues, warped with reverberating
guitar tones and slapped non-standard percussion.
The disc closes with perhaps its most impressive cut, "Satyn Sai Sweetback
Plays Oxblood Boots." Like the other extended tracks, this one takes its
time getting going, playing with an all-percussion interlock of knocks,
pounds and clicks for a full minute before even the faintest hint of violin
enters in, mosquito-like, in the interstices. Then the hallucinatory,
heavily reverbed words come in, each word echoing like a rock thrown into a
pond, until the sense disappears and only mood remains. Repetitive
hammering, harsh industrial sounds, mysterious chants — it all coalesces
into a trance-like journey through altered states.
The Flood is another interesting excursion from one of acid folk's most
free-spirited bands.
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