Wilderness /// “Arkless” /// Wilderness
There’s no compulsion here, with music outlets polishing their best-of-decade lists, to publish an exhaustive piece that merely grants a window onto my own listening habits. Plus, this blog already constitutes such a view. Instead, I’d like to spend a week or two outlining What You Should Have Heard, 2000-2009, thereby showcasing some gems that have gotten and are likely to continue getting short shrift no matter how many listeners I attempt to convert. First up is Wilderness, a Baltimore whose self-titled 2005 debut was a wake-up call to anyone who thought post-rock was just slow crescendos recorded in a barn. Aqueous and sand-blasted, tribally chanted and classically lucid, Wilderness tapped into a fractal paranoia at one of many Bush-era nadirs for the U.S., marked in particular by revelations of proto-fascist torture and abuse. Such an environment lent chilling associations to the otherwise encrypted politics of songs like “End Of Freedom” and “Shepherd In Sheep’s Clothing.” But no track tingles the spine like the mercury-poisoned “Arkless,” its vision of a modern deluge bolstered by avalanches of drums and downright evil spindles of guitar. James Johnson is a fearless and unique punk vocalist; his Biblical sneer that “the flights of fancy come into ruin” is arresting in its own right and anticipated the vile remarks of Evangelists who saw in hurricane Katrina the justified smiting of a sinful city. Four years on, the album doesn’t carry the contextual heat it once did, but it remains a all-consuming abyss of high-concept, earth-quaking rock.
