#delmore

This Record Store Day release collects the original songs from Wild Carnation’s first album, demo versions of seven of these 12 tracks and what looks like the entirety of a 1997 live gig in Hamburg, Germany. Thirty-one cuts in all, it provides a sweeping view of Wild Carnation’s early incarnation (there was another album called Superbus, some 12 years after the first). If the band was overlooked before, it is fully represented now.

And really, that’s a good thing, because there’s not a single dud on Tricycle. From the noise-addled propulsion of “The Rising Tide” straight through to the folk-picked intimacy of “Shaker Tune,” the main album cuts are uniformly engaging, and you get to hear them more than once, in various iterations.

For example, “Susquehanna 142,” a nod to the trains that crisscross Garden State sets up a hazy, mesh of intersecting guitar picking and lilting vocal descants. If you like that, and how could you not, the compilation provides additional context in the form of a barer, folkier demo and a pensive live version that brings out the tune’s dreamy side. Later, “The Lights are On (but No One’s Home)” blares and buzzes with feedback, a dirty crust under its careening, multi-voiced harmonies. A live performance brings the main melodic line to the front, emphasizing its hooky, poppy side and submerging the roar of amps.

The live cuts also provide a peek into Wild Carnation’s influences, with covers of Patti Smith, Neil Young and the sister band Speed the Plough. Barnes challenges the audience to name the band that wrote one of the most obscure covers, offering a free CD to anyone who gets it right. The CD goes unclaimed because even among the most ardent German audience, no one besides the band is very familiar with The Grass Roots. The song — “Wait a Million Years” — fits pretty neatly into Wild Carnation’s aesthetic, though, with sharp, power pop guitar licks, bashing rhythms and a melody that is both triumphant and minor-key melancholy.

You could certainly approach Tricycle as a Feelies side project, noting its similarities and thinking a lot about whether the music is better or worse. But this extended reissue argues for considering Wild Carnation on its terms, with stronger folk roots and careening, often thrilling vocal parts. Delmore will be putting out a similar package around Superbus in the fall, and even if it’s as long as this one, it seems like a pity that there wasn’t more.