Wye Oak at The Sugar Club, Saturday 14th June 2014

With perhaps the year’s best album in their merch stand, Wye Oak have certainly dispelled any suspicions that they may remain your typical indie rock band. The Maryland two-piece’s new sound would best be described as “what ’80s music would sound like if ’80s music was good” and indeed songs from ‘Shriek’ play a prominent part of tonight’s Sugar Club show, as singer Jenn Wasner takes up the bass guitar and keyboard, while Andy Stack beats a one-handed drum and synth of his own.

New Zealander Bacholerette arrives before the main act and begins as she means to continue, with technical glitches. As she tells us she has been apologising her away across Europe as her elaborate setup of laptops, synth, sound pad, two microphones, effect pedals and guitar has time and again refused to do what she wants it to do. Nonetheless, when she manages to harmonise her many devices her experimental-side-of-pop sound is properly enjoyable.

The bass guitar appears first in Wasner’s hands and the show begins with their new album’s opening track, Before. The structure of these new songs becomes more explicit in the live setting, the reliance on a traditional verse-chorus-verse structure. But the way the song is arranged makes it seem airier and freer, which opens it up for slight but important variations. An instrument can drop out for a bar and you sit on the edge of your seat awaiting its return.

The creative leap the band have taken becomes explicit once some of the older material appears, with Plains from their third album ‘Civilian’. Now playing electric guitar, Jenn’s vocals seem almost trapped inside the structure of the power-chorded verses. It’s no surprise then that this song features brief explosive bursts of drum and guitar, and the lyric “but it couldn’t contain me” seems appropriate for the occasion. These are the songs of a songwriter trapped by convention, and doing everything she can to escape them. ‘Shriek’ is the result of breaking free from those conventions altogether.

However a few longtime fans are more excited when the older tracks pop up, and make their approval known whenever the guitar reappears. That familiar burst of sound crops up on For Prayer and when it disappears the audience contrives a cheer to fill the sound gap a second or two after it suddenly quietens down. It’s hard to ignore that these tracks pop up to satisfy the die-hards rather than to supplement the set. Frustration and entrapment is what they seem to communicate, while emotional variety is found on the new songs.

The ballady I Know The Law graduates into a beautifully messy vocal loop as Jenn sings “I know” and the words start to become muddled as the sound crashes into yet another noisy crescendo. It’s with Glory however that everything comes together; the bass-playing, the synths, the one-handed drumming, the effects, the songwriting and Jenn’s wonderful singing voice. It’s her voice that makes these numbers as good as they are, songs written like she is no longer searching for her own identity, but knows how to accentuate the hidden quirks in her tone.

As the gig inevitably passes into encore-mode, a cover of Running Up That Hill, with Jenn back on bass, gives a telling indication to where Wye Oak’s new sound has come from. It may not be as wildly original a sound as some other artists are exploring in 2014, but ‘Shriek’ is a band definitively arriving where it is supposed to, musically. They finish off their encore with Civilian, which is loud, melodic, and crowd-pleasing. And like that song – with its synthy leanings – perhaps the latest batch of tunes are a mere taster for what is to come from this Baltimore band. The suspicion they leave us with tonight that their music could get even better is a prominent and exciting one.