On Wye Oak's New Direction

Last week saw a flurry of activity and announcements from Wye Oak. The band, originally from Baltimore but now spread across the USA, have announced the release of their fourth studio album, Shriek, on April 29^th and the first track to be released from it, “The Tower”, has been played on various radio stations and podcasts and a video has been doing the rounds online.

Last year, when discussing the new album, Jenn Wasner and Andy Stack revealed that it would feature no guitars. This news came despite an August 2012 concert broadcast by NPR where the band debuted 2 new songs, both very heavy on guitar and both astonishingly good. However in the year and a half since then, the band has progressed and those songs seem to have fallen by the wayside.

Weak - Seaweed

My first encounter with Seaweed came about during a period in my musical taste that is by no means individual to me. Since Nirvana's Nevermind became a touchstone of modern music in 1991, it seems almost every teenager with a passing interest in rock, goes through a phase of listening primarily to grunge. Nirvana's influence is so lasting that kids that never even shared a planet with Kurt Cobain are still wearing t-shirts with his face on. I for one made sure I had all their albums and singles and any bootlegs I could get my hands on. This, of course, failed to satisfy the record collector in me and as I looked further into Nirvana's history I decided to pick up any records I could find by other bands on the Sub Pop label (Nirvana's first home). Amongst 7 inches by Gas Huffer and B-sides collections by Mudhoney, I found Seaweed's single Bill.