Wild Pink - Wild Pink

Pitchfork 73

The members of Wild Pink live in Brooklyn but really reside in their own minds. Whether it’s mundane NYC landmarks (the Taconic Parkway, a giant clock over the John Smolenski Funeral Home) or hallowed monuments, Wild Pink seek the familiar in their dynamic surroundings. “Riding out some psychotropics/In the shadow of the World Trade/Trying hard to understand the culture in my face,” John Ross sings in “Great Apes.” Wild Pink lives in this wearied New York state of mind: standing on the subway, walking through crowds lost in thought, letting the mental chatter drown out every voice around you.

After two EPs that found the Brooklyn trio exploring an array of mid-fi ’90s influences, they’ve honed a sound that suits Ross’ perspective—maybe not so much comfortably numb as “manageably anxious,” reminiscent of early Death Cab for Cutie or American Analog Set, bands who took on characteristics of slowcore without being stylistically bound to it. Parallel to his band’s evolution, Ross has ditched his searching yelp and distilled his entire emotional range into a single, unshakeable tone. It’s not monotonous, per se; what Ross does is a variation on “shower voice,” a sort of a tuneful mutter. The ways his timbre peaks through sundazed ambience (“Broke On”), glistening jangle-pop (“Great Apes”) or piercing fuzz (“Nothing to Show”) can be remarkable or infuriating—like hearing chatter in the library where you can just make out enough of the conversation that it doesn’t become white noise.

At times, Ross can unnerve the listener enough to lean in closer for his lyrics, which are like quotables from non-contextual conversations: “I’ve got a dad’s breath/From cheap beer and cigarettes,” “You are the beauty queen/You left piss on the seat,” or most memorably, “Then I said something dumb/Like ‘the Redskins hate the Cowboys because Kennedy died in Dallas.’” Ross says the latter to defuse the tension of visiting a roadside vigil on the opening “How Do You Know if God Takes You Back?,” and throughout Wild Pink, the jokes serve as his emotional armor. His picture of an isolated, yet contented youth is drawn with John Darnielle-esque detail (“My whole world was in my room/Playing both sides of a Magic game/Black vs. Green/And a bootleg Maxell tape of Queen”) and on the devastating closer, he recalls to a friend, “On 9/11 your mom took you to see Legally Blonde.” The names of these songs are, respectively, “Wanting Things Makes You Shittier” and “They Hate Our Freedom.”

For the most part, though, Wild Pink deals in the usual language of the overeducated and underemployed. “You’re cultured and cursed/With dated ideas about what it means to have American Dreams,” Ross sings on “I Used to Be Small.” And other times, he just takes issue with cell phones. “Put your phone down/Put your phone down,” Ross sings, but none of his words feel judgmental—they’re just a polite, noticeably exhausted request.

“You’ll hear about the war and know it’s not yours,” Ross warns during a visit to a nursing home on “Broke On.” Throughout, there’s a discernible yearning for something worth fighting for, something character-building, as the older generation might have put it: “there’s no war left to win” or, “all my life I wish I had died bravely.” These lines carry a heavier, more political resonance now than they probably did when Wild Pink was recorded. Had it been released last year, it might have just been a solid indie rock record about everyday New York living. But Ross sounds like so many people whose nebulous concerns about the future have been sharpened. Wild Pink may not be a generation’s bonfire, but it now sounds like the slow burn leading up to it.