Wye Oak - Shriek + Variations

In 2014, Wye Oak released their fourth album, Shriek; a necessary departure for Jenn Wasner and Andy Stack, who found themselves on uncertain ground after two years of constant touring for 2011’s Civilian, living on opposite ends of the country and trying to revitalize their creative partnership. Wasner set aside her guitar for a bass. Stack took on the band’s upper register, playing syncopated, meditative keyboard parts that interacted with Wasner’s voice, which was newly freed from its call-and-response relationship to the guitar what had been, until then, a signature of Wye Oak’s sound.

During that period, Wasner and Stack were introduced to William Brittelle, whose orchestral reimaginings of five songs from Shriek (Shriek: Variations, if you will) are the centerpiece of this package, which serves not only to mark the tenth anniversary of a great album, but to demonstrate the richness of Wye Oak’s compositions. Stack says of Shriek: Variations, “It’s like looking at the songs in a funhouse mirror. The songs on Shriek can be stripped down or embellished this is maximal embellishment. William took the album and blew it to smithereens, looking at it in a weird, prismatic way.”

+ 10th Anniversary Shriek repress including Shriek: Variations, available on very limited indie-only orange swirl coloured vinyl.

Through Brittelle, Wasner and Stack found themselves at the intersection of classical, experimental, and pop music. That shift began here. Shriek: Variations may feel like a startling take on the material, but Brittelle’s arrangements are largely original to his first collaborations with Wye Oak a decade ago, suggesting that his maximalist arrangements have lived comfortably within the framework of Shriek the whole time, waiting for the right moment to emerge. Here, with help from Brittelle’s expansive compositions, the release draws attention back to the Songwriting how, regardless of the instrumentation, Wasner and Stack’s uncanny music writing partnership at the core is what makes both Shriek and Wye Oak excellent. Joined by the Metropolis Ensemble, Paul Wiancko, and Lizzie Burns, Wye Oak turn songs like “Logic of Color” inside out, reaching towards a kind of pastoral bombast, Brittelle’s aesthetic with Wasner and Stack as an anchor. In fact, “Logic of Color” in this iteration takes that “no-guitar” script and flips it, with Wasner playing the synthesizer ostinato on acoustic guitar at its center. If Shriek is a record that charts the depths of solemnity and inner space, its Variations, roiling in a sea of winds, brass, and strings, recolors that space and complicates it, a gorgeous, unexpected response to the original’s siren call.