Wand – Plum

'Plum' is as strange as the title is weird, but this is a good thing for Wand....
Wand : Plum
8.1 Drag City
2017 

Wand : PlumPlum is as strange as the title is weird, but this is a good thing for Wand. It has a lot of rock, but also a lot of acoustics, which is rare for the act. That said, it works very well, and the songs meld together to form a Wand-typical mood, starting with “Plum”, a kind of a plodding track, but in a good way, as it goes for eerie rather than annoyingly tearjerking. “Bee Karma” is solid and energetic, and “Charles De Gaulle” is also intricately moody.

Further on, “High Rise” is the very definition of a classic rock slow burner, in the way the third Wand album played on many ‘70s rock themes, and “White Cat” is solid indie-metal, but nothing to write home about. If Wand intended to play with genres on Plum, they certainly achieved it, and the softly, detailed, poignant, percussion of “The Trap”, “Ginger”, and “Blue Cloud” has a solemn or melancholy alternative theme going for them. Even the final track, “Driving”, is Beatles-esque.

While the opening few tracks remind us that in a certain defining way, Wand make the mundane bold. Almost like Kyuss or Queens of The Stone Age, and often have elements of stoner rock rather than just indie metal. All this just reinforces Wand as great, and Plum, while not perfect, is great, as bafflingly great as Wand is unheralded.

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