The Wiggins, Greatest Apes EP

Though the dog days of summer are past, there’s a certain musical reddening still available to us — the Wiggins’ Greatest Apes EP is a summer record in the best of ways: it’s loud, euphoric, and indifferent to taste. The production is a black junkyard of sound, the prevailing sentiment, celebratory.

That being said, this isn’t that great a record. The tricky thing is, that’s what makes this a great record. In an age where rock has had its every edge rubbed smooth, it’s nice to see some inconsistency, some roughness — a sensation more interesting than pleasant. There’s something to be said for imperfection, something to be said, even, for a tribute to it, a murky slop of a record, a testament not to how we want things to be (carefully constructed) but to how things actually are: uncontained, pretty, and vicious.

The Wiggins (the one-man anti-symphony of Jon Reeves) start things off with kinetic fuck-all force — “Lying” is a Dionysian shriek, a well of complete excess. We never know, really, what’s going on, only that there’s too much of it, that it exceeds, that the music spills over whatever container (whatever, say, structure) was meant to contain it. This is glorious, not nonsense, but non-sense, not insignificant but irrational, and not just irrational, but overwhelmingly so. This is the sort of go-ahead “Louie, Louie” action punk rock is made of; it’s simplistic, it’s over the top, and it’s carnal to the point of bestiality. Not a single lyric is (ultimately) decipherable, but the force of the nasal, bombastic delivery (“a metallic scrape” is how my girlfriend grudgingly characterized Jon’s voice) is undeniable. There may be additional meaning, but there is no greater meaning than force. That is, it’s not about what causes displacement, it’s about displacement itself, the great, dark shoving aside.

The record’s nasty, is the thing. It makes me want to fuck underage girls and watch mind-numbing amounts of television. This is an adolescent record, which, let’s be clear, is often used as a pejorative term but here is used to denote the uncertainty and menace of beginning, of all beginnings. This is an adolescent record too in the sense that it celebrates possibility above desire; it’s not what you want to happen, it’s what could happen, it’s what can happen, in musical form. Like I said, this is an adolescent record. Who knows what, exactly, is being said. The only thing that’s clear is that it matters, even if only to me, even if only for an already passing moment… Adolescence as an emotional thunderclap; no meaning except in volume and no meaning, needed. Rock you like a hurricane.

Unfortunately, not all of the record lives up to these low standards. Even if you are, like yrs truly, a fan of inconsistency, this is a record that can be painfully inconsistent. Too many tracks (“Cold,” “Johnny”) devolve into undifferentiated sludge. The drum machines become less playful, increasingly more routine. No matter how aggressive, the guitars often fade into general, anonymous sound. There’s not much else. The record’s dirty but it’s not always raw (which it needs to be). Tracks moving on dark, insistent grooves bottom out, their pathways shrivel. It’s not that the songs are fucked up, it’s that they’re not fucked up enough; they’re inconsistent, true, but no longer in an interesting way, now they’re merely vague and if menacing, only comically so. The high wears off, and what’s left is bothersome, busy with inanity, and tired, even, of itself.

But there’s plenty to admire here. There’s the sudden segue into “Where Did You Sleep Last Night,” full of dumb, bellowing passion. There’s “Hill” (arguably the album’s best track), and the liquored-up caution of its delivery, the teenaged non-tedium of it, simple in concept, but actually earned: there’s a hill, there’s a boat, there’s a certain difficulty saying. Even the teenage boasts (“You’ll be happy when I’m gone / I was wrong / You can hear it in my songs”) ring true. The genuine sulk of this, the sunny fatalism of it.

But mostly, there’s track one bravado (and it’s well worth the price of admission). And if you’re not taken in by the everything and the kitchen sink aggression of it, there’s always the call/response aspect; I myself have spent several hours deciding which lyrics I will shout, out loud, all hours of the morning. “I know you’re sad somehow,” or alternately, “I know you’re sad, somehow,” or the way it actually sounds, “I know you’re SAD SOMEHOW.” “I’m fucking MAD NOW.” “Because you won’t share with me / I have to take a HAND OUT.” This is more rewarding than you might think. “You’re just a LET DOWN / I’m fucking MAD NOW.” Isn’t this how I want to feel? “GET OFF THE SKY / GET OFF / GET OFF / GET OFF.” Like a bull in a china shop.