#upper wilds

Upper Wilds puts Friel back on guitar and surrounds him with rock players – that’s Zach Lehrhoff of Ex-Models and Pterodactyl on bass and Aaron Siegel on drums. Electronics still screech and hiss and burble maniacally at the margins, but they cede precedence to chiming, stirring guitar chords, as on the opener, “Reentry Breakup Recorder,” which rumbles with space engine noises at the outset but coalesces around a riff that can only be called anthemic (and continues into the bludgeoningly catchy “UFO”).

While not quite a concept album, Guitar Module 2017 works at some common themes throughout — the destruction of nature, its consequences and the possibility of interplanetary migration; it has an odd combination of pessimism and exuberance. “Vampire Crane,” for instance, contemplates an overbuilt future in which ““The tunnel's getting wider than the mountain No place left to build nowhere to go,“ while “Chainsaw” ponders the ravages of deforestation. “Let’s Build a Moon,” riffs on a similarly buzz-saw distorted but tuneful song by the Swell Maps (“Let’s Build a Car”) but sees technology less as a fun toy than a post-apocalyptic escape hatch. Yet while all these songs pose troubling questions, they are delivered with euphoric good cheer. The noise is loud and bubbly and fills your chest like highly carbonated optimism.

That weird mix of triumph and existential dread extends to the one non-space related tune, “Roy Sullivan,” which considers the odds-beating case of a Virginia park ranger who survived seven separate lightning strikes. A high screaming guitar scramble gives way to a galumphing four/four beat, the kind that shakes the foundations, as Friel considers the good fortune (or otherwise) of this unlikely hero. “Count yourself lucky 12345/6-7-8 times now sky's come down for my life /Tell me bout your troubles man I'll tell you mine/Get ready to ascend in that Elysian light,” he sings, in the kind of giddy close harmony amid noise that might remind you of certain Mission of Burma songs. 

Indeed, as with the Parts & Labor albums, you can draw comparisons from Guitar Module 2017 to first round Burma, to Hüsker Dü and to Wire, because it is so confrontational and yet so grin-inducingly fun. If you’ve missed P&L’s amp-bending catchiness and didn’t quite find it in the solo material, this is for you. 

This is the third of Upper Wild’s planet-themed album releases, following 2021’s Venus and 2018’s Mars. Jupiter is the largest of planets, named for the king of gods, so no surprise that this record is an expansive one, bursting with jagged rock mayhem and soaring rock and roll choruses. The title track fires rocket fuel blasts in short, one-two bursts, then coalesces in an antic, mosh-pit frenzy, a dense fray of guitar, drums, bass that begs for up and down jumping. “It's bigger than our minds could know/So heavy that our hearts explode,” sings Friel, and that, perhaps, is the album’s central dilemma. How can you write about something so vast and make it accessible on a human, relatable scale?

The sweep and glacial timeline of outer space squashes human history down into nothing, as illustrated in the drum-battered, droning skirl of “Short Centuries.” A martial thrill runs through its keening chorus, its war-drum cadence. There’s something tribal and primitive about the way it sounds, however it’s electrified and amped. And indeed, that’s something that Upper Wilds has always been good at, channeling the feral joy of militancy into fuzzy, guitar-drenched soundscapes.

The largeness of the subject matter is somewhat daunting. Friel admits it in “Infinity Drama,” noting the crushing weight of the eternal on the human spirit and adding, somewhat slyly, “Just don't try to tell me how it ends.” And so it’s left to punk rock heroes from days past to make sense of the infinite. The Husker Du cover, “Books About UFOs,” makes the drive to understand ordinary and human—a trip to the library, a pile of books about UFOs—and so universal in a way that songs about the universe can never be.

But meanwhile, Friel and his Upper Wild brethren boldly go, guitars flaring, drums pounding, bass thudding, spirits alive to the vast mysteries of the cosmos. Jupiter’s a banger and bigger than we deserve.

“Love Song #2” sings of love in the time of the COVID-19, a monstrous, mind-addling barrage of guitar/bass/drum noise bombing through lyrics about Friel’s cousin Amy, driving a truck through America while her husband keeps the kids at home. “Love Song #3” speaks of love among the stars, caterwauling electronics doing backflips on top of sheer undulating volume, as constellations form and reform themselves in the night sky. “Love Song #4” and “Love Song #5” admit the limits of love, an amp-fried chant confiding, “You know the sun won't care if you fall in love/And the void still stares if you fall in love,” as a carnival swell of agitated electronics builds to hurricane strength. All of which is to say that these may be love songs, but they are not sweet or sentimental. They’re love songs made of chaos and adrenaline and explosions, and they rock pretty hard.

That’s partly because of Friel’s band, Jason Binnick on bass and Jeff Ottenbacher on drums. Unlike on his solo albums, this is not just Friel on his antic guitar and electronics, channelling giddy euphorias in squiggly sound. No, it’s a continuous barrage of bass and drums, knocking his inimitable fuzz-crusted hooks sideways and to pieces and rampaging on regardless.  It’s a different kind of love when the three of them are involved, more muscular and not as whimsical and smelling sharply of testosterone. These are pop songs moved to violence, joy heated to a roiling boil, and you could ask, “Is this love or war?” and answer, “Yes.”