Austin Sound

It’s difficult to decipher exactly what the Wailing Walls are attempting to impart on their bizarrely brilliant sophomore LP, but Bryan Crowell’s San Marcos collective delivers such an explosive and infectious collection of power-pop pillared tunes that whatever “concept” supposedly threads the two-act rock opera together is pushed to the background anyway. Long Live the Infidel sets itself in a nursing home, and as such, its characters and songs seem the dementiaed projections of a cast harshly ruminating on impending mortality through the elusive hindsight of memories, regrets, and dreams. At turns poignantly wrought, hilariously effusive, and brutally abrasive, the songs largely lift themselves beyond the plot, the underpinning universality of their themes and the powerful thrust of their arrangements pulling in all directions and ultimately seeming to culminate in a fervent, life-affirming celebration.

Following the short string-swept intro, “Hopefully, I Led A Good Life” opens the saga with a barrage of guitars and ferocious drums as Crowell’s fluctuating vocals tremble carnivalesque through the jagged shifts. The song sets the stage of a life on the edge of departing: “When I go, I can only hope a flag’s half mast, While reminiscence of the past is reft of any foolish times.” The lines throughout are heavy and dexterous, but Crowell jumps through them surprisingly lightly, matching each unbridled turn with a voice ringing out clearly and into the shouting, swelling choruses. The song’s final line of “I cannot say which is worse, To be remembered with appall, Or covered deep in dirt and grass, Never to be recalled at all,” seems to unfold the album’s central dilemma. “HDM,” which along with “Jimmy Dean” make up the LP’s two best tracks, bounces upbeat and defiant with a gravely howl, handclaps bursting through the bridge, and “What A Year” settles into a beautifully soft waltz behind horns and distorted guitar. These interjected gentler moments give the album its weight and provide ballast to the more energetic and chaotic surges.

There is no clear narrative sequence between the songs, and in this way Crowell and Co. may best capture the unraveling flux of the minds of the characters. Memories flit in with joyous recall and sink into lost despair, unbound by time and place but seemingly conscious of the frustrated lack of control over the ebb and flow. The movement is rather Joycean in it’s solipsistic disjointedness. “Jimmy Dean” is at once the lightest of the songs and perhaps the most bereft in its loss, leaping through beautiful memories of love with catchy melodies, but cut with a sad loneliness of left living only in the past that culminates in the following soliloquy of “Colossus.”

Act II begins with the crushing reflection of “Lousy Excuse,” a ramshackled piano embodying broken-bodied regrets: “You don’t know how much you deserve major chords, I am sorry I couldn’t give you more.” Overall, the second act proves less impressive, the swirling nursery rhyme-like “Beast of Bourbon” and short interlude of “Monkeys” seeming unnecessary and distracting from the album, and the controlled but chiming classic guitar riffs of “Stitches for Stabwounds” stretching too thinly compared to the power and punch of the first half. Still “Loose Bean” warps a confusion and uncertainty of the threshold that works into the scruffy and moaning guitars, and the closing title track brings the album back to point with a gorgeous melody and Crowell crooning gently, “Where I go I’m going, Where I’ve gone I have been, Play the whole thing backwards you’ll find, I was fixing mistakes, mending all the breaks.” Only in the closing sentiment, lifting upwards with horns and strings like the soul finally let loose, does the entire work seem to fall into context with purpose: “Everybody’s got a pitchfork, in the pantry of their past, where love and life derail, Long live the infidel.” If the album stitches itself through the ruminating despair and hope of the characters, this may be the ultimate realization distilled – clinging celebratorially to regrets and memories because they reflect the shadows of life’s import, containing the blessings granted precisely through their loss.

Websites:
www.thewailingwalls.com
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