Vinyl LP, Compact Disc (CD), Cassette
For their first album in two years, the LA band Wand expanded to a five-piece and bandleader Cory Hanson ceded some of the creative control he’d held since the group first appeared in 2013. For any other outfit, this would be just a blip on a bio, but on Plum, that change in approach has yielded profound results. The album’s eight proper songs (there are a pair of instrumental asides) are rich and expansive, favoring texture and shading over the bongwater psychedelia of their first few outings.
But a knowledge of Wand’s bleary past isn’t necessary to appreciate Plum’s new beauty. The title track could be an outtake from Paul McCartney’s Ram: there’s a steadily-blinking piano, a roving bassline, a tangle of silvery guitar, and Hanson’s creamy tenor carrying a gently-drifting vocal melody. “Charles DeGaulle” is full of empty space; organ and guitar tumble out in tight bundles, and Hanson—sounding eerily like Thom Yorke—slips like a ghost in the vacancies between them. Even the more aggressive numbers are elegantly sculpted. The crunching “High Rise” opens with a greasy, bluesy guitar pattern, collapses briefly into cemetery silence, then the riff returns to ride the song through to its conclusion. And the grinding “Bee Karma” nicks the guitar line from “Pictures of Matchstick Men” and alternates between dreamlike verses and a big, roaring chorus.
Hanson has said that the record was shaped by heartbreak, but nothing about Plum feels bleak or disconsolate. It’s instead a richly-detailed collection of guitar-forward psych-pop, building up rococo melodies one minute and setting them ablaze with blinding guitar work the next.
—J. Edward Keyes
