Noise

[Indie Rock]

Wilderness

(K)no(w)here

Spencer Patterson

Thu, Nov 20, 2008 (midnight)

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If boxing promoter Don King fronted a rock band, he’d probably sound a lot like James Johnson. The vocalist for arty Baltimore outfit Wilderness unleashes every one of his lyrics with equal, unrestrained enthusiasm, speak-singing table-setters like “Here is a storyline for you!” in the same grand fashion as glorious payoffs like “As we shall say, so it ends!”

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Wilderness: (K)no(w)here
Three stars
Beyond the Weekly
Wilderness
Wilderness MySpace
Billboard.com: Wilderness

All of that ultra-theatrical over-voicing can be disorienting, particularly since the band’s third album, (K)no(w)here, plays as one long piece, nary a split-second pause between its eight tracks. For a while, say the first 15 minutes, it feels quite epic ... until it doesn’t. When everything is made to seem amazingly important, at some point nothing actually does.

Still, Johnson’s grand experiment never completely caves under its own weight, a testament to the clever arrangements beneath his words. The disc’s standout moments are those that actually stand out amid all the anthemic blustering—Colin McCann’s Floydian backing vocals on “(P)ablum” or the subtle tempo shifts in “Chinese Whisperers,” for example. Otherwise, it all comes off sorta like someone shouting the entirety of “The Cask of Amontillado” atop cascading guitars, in a strangely entertaining way.

If you haven’t stood on a hillside, fist-pumped and felt your heart swell in a while, (K)no(w)here could be your new best friend. Just bring a little Judy Collins along to balance you out afterwards.

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