Wheat has returned to their original name on Everyday I Said a Prayer For Kathy And Made a One Inch Square, and in many ways, they’ve returned to their original sound, an intimate-but-conversational sonic rambling, but expanding it, into a full wall of atmosphere. After their label went bust in 2000, the New Englanders changed their name to ‘wheat*’, and produced the straightforwardly indie-pop/folk Per Second, Per Second, Per Second… Every Second, which somehow managed to have three pieces featured in three different ‘a pretty blond girl’s love reawakens disillusioned young man’ films (Win a Date With Tad Hamilton!, A Cinderella Story, and Elizabethtown). But since then, guitarist Ricky Brennan has gone off for a solo project, Duresse, leaving only singer/songwriter Scott Levesque and drummer Brendan Harvey. Together, these two have forged a path both new and old, bringing back the personal meanderings of their late nineties records Hope & Adams and Medeiros, but marrying it to today’s ‘Canadian Invasion’/post-rock encompassing keyboard/guitar uplift.
This backwards/forwards shift didn’t come completely as a surprise, as it was presaged on their end-of-’06 EP, That’s Exactly What I Wanted… Exactly That (one thing from Per Second Wheat has not abandoned is extremely long album titles…); in fact, Exactly’s second track, “Little White Dove”, is also Kathy’s second track. “Dove” features a distant, distorted ‘piano man’ effect, which goes into an expansive rock in its second half, and it follows Kathy’s (rather strange choice for an) opener, “Closeness”, whose close-up, symphonic ‘piano man’ effect also goes into an expansive rock later on. That isn’t the only place where Exactly pops up in Kathy, as the soft, touching melody of Exactly’s finisher, the instrumental “Washing Machine Blues”, seemingly forms the basis of Kathy’s “I Had Angels Watching Over Me”, a matter-of-fact piece that is also ironic, and which wisely doesn’t get too full of itself.
“Angels” wanders a bit before it gets bigger, but the song does it well and wins you over; that nature is the signature of the rest of Kathy’s best tracks. “Move = Move” is probably the most immediately accessible, with a rocking tempo and guitars that form a laid-back, but not disaffected, indie-pop, one that’s not too one-note or shiny. “An Exhausted Fixer” isn’t as immediately easy, with its vocals going from flat talking in the verse to a reverb in the chorus, but definitely ends up getting to you with its growing confidence. The preceding “Round In the Corners” starts on a high note, with high keys and choral vocals, but brings you up to its level, with a nice, fuller, guitar/keys/drums sound when you get there. But it is “What You Got” that is probably the most moving and enveloping track on Kathy, with a strong quick tempo that makes even its guitar meanderings work.
In general on this release, Wheat has given keyboards the advantage over guitars, but the record works better when the guitars aren’t neglected and the keys aren’t overdone. Virtually all instrumentation is minimized in “Init 005 (Formerly a Case of…)”, leaving only Levesque’s cracking voice, in a real drag of a number. In the next song, Kathy goes the other poor direction, with the high-without-any-point keys and vocals of “Saint In Law”. Sandwiched between “Angels” and “What You Got”, these two leaden pieces are a huge dip in the middle of the record.
After the soundtrack-y pop/rock of Per Second, Per Second, Per Second… Every Second, Wheat was wise to reclaim their less direct roots, and even wiser to give those roots this new direction, an encompassing aura of sound. Everyday I Said a Prayer For Kathy And Made a One Inch Square meanders a lot in its journey, testing one’s patience (not unlike its title), but the routes aren’t all the same. A few of the songs never make it to wherever they were headed, but most do, and they’re worth it.
