6. Wye Oak – ‘Civilian’ [City Slang]
Far from falling into the folk-pop bracket many assign it to, Wye Oak ’s ‘Civilian‘ embodies everything that’s good and right about rock music in its purest form. Awash in Jenn Wasner’s soulful, desolate and restrained vocal, the songs are as reliant on the pounding percussion of Andy Stack’s drum as they are their painstakingly honest melody. – Tiffany Daniels
“[Approaching this record differently] was conscious in that we had imposed deadlines upon ourselves, but the weird thing was that I had written all of those songs in a really short period of time, which doesn’t happen very often and which was something really special.
I think the last time we’d written a record, which was the record before; we were a little bit frustrated because we recorded it and mixed it ourselves and we are not super qualified engineers, so we just ended up kind of going in circles with it. It’s really hard to know when you’re that close to something when to stop and when to say “it’s done“. And we never really felt like it was finished and we never really achieved what we were trying to achieve.
This time there were two things: A – we wanted to work within deadlines and, B – we wanted to work with a mix engineer and producer so that we could have a third party to say “ok it’s done, let’s move on, it’s finished”. The guy we worked with, John Congleton, his best piece of advice was that usually your gut impulse is the right one and having infinite options and infinite time does not make a great record. So he kind of forced us to go with our gut on everything and as scary as it was, it was really good.
I honestly like it so much more now, obviously we’ve been playing these songs a lot live but when we finished the record I was kind of lost and really didn’t know how I felt about it at all. I didn’t listen to it for a really long time and it wasn’t until a couple of months ago I actually went back and listened to it again after people had been telling us that they liked it. I had some space and time away from it and I heard it totally differently and I was like “wow, I don’t hate this!”
It didn’t sound the same to me as it did when we were working on it. There are always things that you would change but there are fewer than I expected, I’ve grown to appreciate what it is.”
– Extracted from Jenn Wasner’s interview with GIITTV’s Hayley Flynn
