Los Angeles-based Wand played Globe Hall on Tuesday on a tour for the yet-to-be-released live album, “Spiders in the Rain.”
Wand was accompanied by a light show from the Mad Alchemist, the master of the “analog liquid light show”. Psychedelic petri-dishes saturated with color swirled over the stage and into the crowd throughout the night. The color-show syncopated and swirled as the Mad Alchemist watched their set closely, intuitively responding to the lulls and upticks in tempo.
Wand played two distinct sets, with a few cherry-picked tracks from albums like “Flying Golem” and “Melted Rope” (Golem) “Bee Karma” and “Blue Cloud” (Plum) and “Sleepy Dog” (1000 Days). Both sets were intermixed with new tracks from the unreleased Spiders in the Rain. The fingerpicking riff of “Bee Karma” loped into a 15 minute, possibly improvised, sidewinding refrain.
According to frontman Cory Hanson, Wand’s label Drag City was less than stoked about the band’s choice to sell Spiders in the Rain LPs at the merch table prior to the official album release, but his rebelliousness feels tongue in cheek. Take one look at Hanson’s Instagram reels and you’ll find a parody of some hot-shot label exec getting on his ass to pump out some catchy, radio-ready pop music.
“[Spiders in the Rain] is our best album yet”, the quintet asserted. While we didn’t cop a newly minted SITR LP, it was obvious that the four were playing music that they believed in. The new album certainly is a free-wheeling display of their talent and their range. Drawing from jazz, metal, and bands like Blur, Oasis and Radiohead in the melodic British pop-rock tradition, Wand is able to craft a sound that is both in conversation with music history and entirely its own. Bassist Lee Landy watched drummer Evan Burrows, guitarist Robert Cody, and frontman Cory Hanson closely as they wound down tracks like “Melted Rope” to somehow impossibly, seamlessly drift into the featherweight fingerpicking of “Bee Karma,” and again from “Bee Karma'' into a SITR track that arched into an accumulating wall of sound.
One could say that it seems like the members of Wand don’t take themselves very seriously–as in their casual demeanor casts them in a friendly, laid back hue. It is readily apparent though, that they take their art very seriously, and the trajectory of the band as they have grown from mind-melting Golem, with riffs that stick to the walls of your skull, to Spiders in the Rain, which is, as far as we can tell, just as noisy, but a technically deft, considered and masterful live album.
Pre-order Spiders in the Rain here.
Written and photographed by Kendall Morris.