Wand
In a Capsule Underground
Drag City
A different side of Wand, to be sure, emerges frazzled and fried from In a Capsule Underground. Collecting freaked out demos and unreleased songs — possibly their first recordings — from the Ganglion Reef era (Wand’s weird 2014 debut album), the new archival LP goes back in time to revisit their own lo-fi, psychedelic cave drawings and travels even further, brushing past early Flaming Lips eruptions and Ty Segall experimentation to shake hands with the paisley ghost of Syd Barrett and old progressive-rock wizards and trolls.
Barely recognizable perhaps to newer converts, many left speechless by the lovely, disarming calm and starry-eyed wonder of 2024’s transcendent Vertigo, this version of Wand was wilder, fuzzier, and more daring. A blinding, zapping quasar, “Clearer” is all head-bobbing, hip-hop beats, distorted guitars, and disembodied vocals, its creators peering through dirty, cracked lenses at fanciful memories of a nightmarish ’60s schoolyard and navigating cacophonous squalls. Just as harrowing and playful, “The Screaming Eye” sends insistent drumming cutting through seasick noise and bubbles into an electrical storm of hallucinogenic menace and melody, while “Send/Receive” slides down zig-zagging chutes of acidic buzzing, which seems to be everywhere here, into swarming madness and a dizzying, kaleidoscopic wilderness. And “Fugue State” sounds like a nastier Iron Butterfly, bathed in radiance and glowing radioactive waste. “In-A-Gadda-Da-Vida,” indeed.
Obscured lyrically by clouds of wayward sounds, but certainly more surreal and not as clear-minded or grounded as recent writings, the whimsically inventive ephemera of In a Capsule Underground is disorienting — often delightfully so — to say the least. Still, specimens of sublime songwriting have survived the cosmic pileups, as tight, percussive acoustic strum marches across a catchy, psychotropic “Broken Candle,” glassy chimes banging together, and the restless epic “Fire on the Mountain Parts I-II-III” shoots flares and fiery comets at trespassers before entering a folky, spacey state of meditation, its varied, disparate arrangements the product of a brilliantly tortured mind.
Hinting at what’s to come for Wand, “Larping Generator” latches onto Can’s krautrock momentum, but steers it into beautiful, majestic nothingness. While scrambling the senses, In a Capsule Underground also saves those drowning in its vast oceans of mind-melting turbulence with “Flying Golem,” a breezy, well-constructed piece of Elephant 6 psych-pop that breathes in the salty air of the sea and takes up residence in the Neutral Milk Hotel. Check-out time is never.
