WILDER MAKER – The Streets Like Beds Still Warm – LP – Black Vinyl [SEP 19]

LP – Black Vinyl

Brooklyn band Wilder Makers principal songwriter, Gabriel Birnbaum, says that the groups latest full-length, The Streets Like Beds Still Warm, follows an overall formal asymmetry, like dream logic. It is richly textured, moody, and deep and is as distinctly narrative as it is literally experimental. To call it a concept album, as big as that term is, would actually be to sell it short. It is, in fact, only the first part of a concept trilogy that tells the tale of one long night in the city, from dusk to dawn.

The album follows a lonely narrator as he drifts down avenues and in and out of bars and hospital rooms. If this sounds a bit noirish, thats because it is. Film noir detectives always start out looking immaculate, but by the end of the film they have a torn collar, a black eye, their slacks are stained, and theyve started slapping people around in desperation, Birnbaum says. Are they the good guy anymore? I find this fascinating and I love the visual cues reflecting the internal landscape.

While there are no visual cues, per se, on The Streets Like Beds Still Warm, the record owes a great debt to cinematography. Impressionistic swirls of effected guitar, drums, and saxophone support Birnbaums husky and world-weary baritone croon, which sometimes echoes Bill Fay. But at times, in all its dim-lit barroom storytelling, one may think of Tom Waits. Its a comparison that threatens both to mislead and sell short, but its difficult not to see things while listening to The Streets Like Beds Still Warm perhaps a slowly swinging Tiffany lamp just above the narrators head as hes a little more than half-drunk, scrawling a brilliantly poetic, antiheroic tale on a bar napkin.

Be assured, though, this is not The Heart of Saturday Night, and its not In the Wee Small Hours. In fact, The Streets Like Beds Still Warms musical precedents come from distinctly different corners of the musical universe. The band draws direct influence from the work of alt-jazz contemporaries Anna Butterss and Jeff Parker, as well as ambient progenitor Brian Eno.

The Streets Like Beds Still Warm is, holistically, a statement of nocturnal and hypnotic storytelling – a matter of both style and substance.Birnbaums investment in the narrative, which ultimately deals in humanity, is reflected by the dreamlike way the tunes themselves unfold. It could not work any other way. Deeply felt and finely focused, undeniably listenable but difficult to pin down, The Streets Like Beds Still Warm is beautifully strange -and it feels like just the kind of thing likely to receive the praise it deserves a decade down the road.

Tracklist:

1 Strange Meeting with Owls
2 Skewered by the Daystar
3 It Was a Flood
4 Atlas on His Day Off
5 Turn SIgnal
6 And You Want to Be My Dog
7 Secret Weather
8 A Tavern Poem, Passed From Mouth to Mouth
9 Another Bullshit Rodeo
10 They Laugh That Win
11 Escape Artist
12 Darkness Leaning Like Water Against the Windows
13 The Moon Says
14 Hores & Hero
15 Demon Confrontation
16 Fixing the Past Is a Sucker’s Game
17 Sea & Swimmer