wild flag: wild flag

“Sound is the blood between me and you,” declares Carrie Brownstein on the anthemic ‘Romance’, and it’s exactly this spirit of sonic kinship that allies the four women of Wild Flag in a charged, ambitious, vibrant union completed by fellow guitarist/singer Mary Timony, drummer Janet Weiss and keyboardist Rebecca Cole. Wild Flag may only have come into being by chance, first collaborating on an instrumental score for Lynn Hershman Leeson’s documentary ‘¡Women Art Revolution!’, but the ties between them date back up to two decades.

Like Brownstein, Timony came of age during the early riot grrrl years (Timony in Autoclave, Brownstein in Excuse 17), and while Brownstein and Weiss sailed to later fame in Sleater-Kinney with Corin Tucker, Timony went on to produce some criminally overlooked material with Helium and, later, a number of beautiful solo endeavours. As for Cole, having quit Elephant 6 collective band The Minders in 2008 she continued to front country outfit Hungry Holler and branched out with garage-rock pastiche band The Shadow Mortons, whose drummer ‘Luvvy Morton’ is none other than Janet Weiss. Neatly completing the circle, Timony and Brownstein have/had a side project of their own, releasing their first EP as The Spells in 1999 and following it up in 2008 with a second EP of long-lost recordings.

As an album, Wild Flag passionately affirms the band’s collective musical lineage. Despite the distinction of the women’s individual ’90s alt. roots, it boasts a classic rock gleam that draws much from the influences they hinted at in the run up to the album release with live covers of the likes of Patti Smith, The Standells and The Rolling Stones: the snaking guitar hook and climactic solo of ‘Glass Tambourine’ has a distinctly ’70s feel, while the dizzying bridge on ‘Short Version’ is pure, rushing ’60s pyschedelia. There remain, predictably, some signature elements of the Sleater-Kinney sound in Wild Flag’s dexterous songcraft, but these are mostly refracted and recast into an agile blend of jubilant pop, loudly irrresistible hooks, decade-spanning rock and cheerful psychedelia courtesy of Cole’s deftly played keyboards. The near-seven minute ‘Racehorse’ unifies all of these elements with a nifty mid-song duet between keys and guitar, weaving in and out of parenthesis before Cole splits off into gleefully discordant stabs of piano.

Coos of backing harmonies pipe through each track, providing a sweet nod to the synchronicity and structure behind the raucous energy of the album’s party-starter numbers, but fans of Timony’s singular drawl (this reviewer included) may find themselves disappointed at her lack of standalone microphone time. Vocally, Wild Flag is Brownstein’s show: she positively struts as frontwoman, bursting across the charged tempos with punchy, hollered yelps, goofing a little on the super catchy, Hammond organ pop of ‘Endless Talk’ and the appreciative wolf-whistle gaze of ‘Boom’ (“I like the way you move across the room, make things go boom!”), where she drops her Ts to oddly Cockney effect.

The heavyweight kick-and-roll percussion that Weiss has honed so wonderfully over the years is in full force throughout the album, but as you’d expect from an outfit headed by two of indie-rock’s most distinctive and inventive guitarists, the show-womanship is all about the fretwork in all its choppy chords, fizzing licks and positively unrestrained noodling. Finale ‘Black Tiles’ sees Timony and Brownstein bow out in a virtuosic display of twin fret gymnastics, a distortion-kissed expression of the unity and joy that Wild Flag represent. It’s the ideal closing statement for an album that works as a sheer celebration of volume and kinetics, played with the collective ease of old friends and the cohesive skill of veterans still utterly in love with their craft.

[Wichita Recordings; October 10, 2011]

Written by: Charlotte Richardson Andrews

Tags: carrie brownstein, janet weiss, mary timony, sleater-kinney, wild flag

This entry was posted on Friday, September 9th, 2011 at 10:35 am and is filed under albums & EPs, reviews. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.