“What is the sound of an avalanche taking out a dolphin? What do get when you cross a hamburger with a hot dog? The answer is: WILD FLAG”. And they’re here with their self-titled debut album from Portland, Oregon and Washington.
Girl, girl, girl and girl forged from a number of different bands including Helium and Sleater-Kinney – writing and playing music together as a unit – seeking and securing the perfect interplay between lead girls Brownstein and Timony. And how refreshing to see a band with bags of talent who run on a healthy dose of energy it is! Especially when at every station there is a female armed with her guitar, or a keyboard or set of drums – ricocheting off each other flawlessly and with unapologetic gustiness.
This kind of band have long seemed in short supply, as opposed to engineered girl bands attacking the charts with dance routines, or otherwise the gimmicky superstars relying on sex appeal alone. Wild Flag can instead be heard calling out lines like: ‘Would you be an engine? I’d like to see you climb. If you need help with your motor. You can borrow mine’ taken from ‘Boom‘, and more poignantly ‘I’m so hardwired to be alone’ from A side single ‘Future Crimes‘.
Wild Flag are about picking guitar strings with a twee sense of flightiness. They’re indie sounding like The Cribs (especially on ‘Future Crimes’) setting an almost blissful restlessness. Vocal duty is shared between decided front woman Carrie Brownstein and accomplice Mary Timony, stroking the songs with a soft gloss and then pinching them with a wonderful wind of angst any time Brownstein pipes up with her Patti Smith/Chrissie Hynde-esque vocals. And she looks a bit like the both of them too… if their 1970s versions had been rolled into one and brought to present day to look out from behind a fringe, claiming territory with a voice. The sound overall has a 70s new wave/post-punk ring to it, raising memories of Martha and The Muffins to the surface but with a fresh batch of songs and without being limited to a solitary hit like ‘Echo Beach‘.
The band understand texture, layering their songs so that they can build up, lift up and kick out the jams – the drumming often egging on some kind of clap along in every breakdown. Timony and Brownstein thread their guitars to intensify, and the band as a whole are apt and able to harmonise sound and lyric, working with everything that they‘ve got.
‘Romance‘ is the other single from the album so far, and it sees the group slip into more of a 1990s style, as though Elastica is riding on their shoulders whispering ideas of bouncy three note riffs played up and down the scale and short punchy verses leading to an actual clap along. If it wasn’t for Brownstein’s voice having a shed load of character, expression and recognition, then the song may be liable to drag until a little flat.
The album overall is complete with soul, riffs and an incredibly amiable style. Wild Flag have got the charm of four people out there to do it, no hang-ups, no prisoners. Their unfussy sense of self-confidence says it all really – you’ve just got to be there to listen.
(Joanne Ostrowski)
