“Hopeless” – The Wrens
(Words/music: The Wrens, available on The Meadowlands, Absolutely Kosher 2003)(Tonight’s post is another one from the archive - originally posted on February 24, 2009. Still, it will be a “new” post for most of you. Back to new posts tomorrow!)Every six months or so, I put on The Meadowlands as a strange sort of challenge – not a challenge to my personal taste or to figure it out, but rather a challenge to the album’s near mythical status. Every so often, something will make me think of the Wrens – a passing news mention on Pitchfork, a band dubiously compared to them, or even just a track popping up into my iTunes party shuffle. Almost every time, I think the same thing – “there’s no way The Meadowlands is as great as everyone claims.” Usually, I only pose these questions once and I’m content with being right or wrong. However, I ask myself this question almost like clockwork, and every time I put The Meadowlands on, I’m convinced all over again. The songs pull the band in different directions, but in a way that avoids cheap genre experimentations. Instead, The Meadowlands adopts different modes in order to tell different stories – like many of the great pop bands before them, The Wrens take risks not for the sake of being edgy or playful, but rather to create a very specific sonic effect for their listeners.
The songs on The Meadowlands display the band’s diverse sonic pallet (often within the same song), but it’s the slowly building “Hopeless” that stands out the most for me. A five note guitar figure runs through the entire song, ranging from the clean plucks the beginning to the overdriven rush in between verses. It serves as an anchor for the song, letting different instruments enter and exit in the different parts of the song. Sometimes, the guitars dominate and rush to the front of the mix, while at other points the piano or drums move to the head of the pack. Still, the song moves along at a steady clip – musically, the band sounds more resentful and angry than hopeless or despondent. Lyrically, Charles Bissell sounds like a man hardened by heartbreak, as he promises “oh no, not this time” in the very first line of the song, later claiming to be the one “used and used to just about anything you would tell me. When I think of “hopelessness,” I also think of helplessness. Instead, the song is only hopeless in the sense that the narrator seems resigned to the fact that a past relationship is beyond repair. However, the time to sit at home and mope appears to be in the past, as he sounds confident and convinced to learn from this experience, the same sort of resolve that this powerful arrangement conveys as well.More on The Wrens: Allmusic | Amazon MP3 | Emusic | Last.fm
I got to interview The Wrens in 1996 whilst we all sat on a row of washing machines in the back of Sudsy Malone’s in Cincinnati, OH. The interview cassette has their voices really low, and the sound of laundry really loud. Every once in a while, my amateurish questions and their patient and friendly answers are interrupted by the sound of a drier door slamming. I wish I could find that cassette.
My go-to Wrens album is Secaucus, mostly because it’s associated with this memory. I know what I’ll be listening to today.
