Wooden Wand review

In the transfer from draft to final version, this review lost some crucial info somehow, so I present the original below:

Wooden Wand
James and the Quiet
(Ecstatic Peace!)

This latest chapter in James Jackson Toth’s ongoing “Gospel according to Wand” is an immeasurable improvement over its predecessors. The further he’s removed from – or at least, less directly influenced by – his Vanishing Voice peeps and their collective New Weird Americanisms, the more ground Toth’s staggering-geezer folk evangelism gains. Harem of the Sundrum & the Witness Figg and last year’s Skygreen Leopards-assisted Second Attention bore this out. Now James & the Quiet completes his gradual emergence from the cdrs’n’sloppy-psych-jamz wilderness; a contact high minimum’s no longer prerequisite to luxuriating in Toth’s worn grooves.

Credit for this is due in large part to producer Lee Ranaldo, who with co-arranger Jennifer Toth – that’s Mrs. Wand, to you – orchestrates old Voice hands and fellow Sonic Youth Steve Shelley to forge a disciplined, succinct Quiet. Consider the stunted-scuzz guitar line that appears partway through the acoustic drizzle of “In a Bucket”; typically Wand bewitching, it’s little more than a fried cog in the tune’s trad verse-chorus-verse structure, an accent to non-sequiters ala “Sometimes you’re shook like a firefly inside a jar/or like a dizzy honeybee in a bucket of tar.” Toth’s conversational, Chick-bookish affability is what matters here; that he’s on a lyrical plateau is a plus, that his fellow musicians frequently harmonize gently – as on preachin’-at-gunpoint fable “Invisible Children” – is a bonus. “We must also love the thieves/And we must also love the liars, because some truth can be found in these,” he drawls instructively against “Thieves”’ stumbling, slumping dice roll of drumkit stutters, tambourine rattles, and Parkinson’s fret trills.