Head with Wings.
Seven precise strokes from a rhythm guitar don’t prepare the listener for the way “The Dream Broker” — the first song from Without Intervention, the latest release from New Haven-based progressive rock band Head with Wings — takes a sudden turn, into thick drums and bass, soaring guitars, and straight through the middle of it, strong yet plaintive vocals. “It’s not funny when you feel this way / You’re champing at the bit to make money then you feel ashamed / Yet you’re coming back for more and more and more,” the singer belts out. “Nobody wants to relive the beginning / Or walk away from a life they’ve built on borrowed time / The situation is so goddamn deflating / Just sign your name along the dotted line.” And then the song turns again, heating up, making the words sink in that much more.
With Without Intervention, the band’s fourth full-length release since 2013’s Living with the Loss, Head with Wings — on this album, Mike Short on drums, Brandon Cousino on guitars, and Joshua Corum on vocals, with bass from Connor Oyster and keyboards and orchestrations by Vikram Shankar — solidifies its sound, hoisting high the flag of modern progressive rock. The dense saturation of “The Dream Broker” gives way to “Task of Breathing,” which takes a more ethereal, textured approach that doesn’t lose its sense of velocity, as the musical ideas just keep coming, until the song has built to a cathartic peak.
“Galaxy” takes off at a gallop, taking up a theme started in “The Dream Broker,” of the perils of trying to make your way in today’s music industry, and more broadly, the technological landscape we live in: “Precious thing / More followers / I say cha ching! / How long can you stay put to task? / Some decisions that you make come back to kick your ass / It’s a long hard road in the victim game / It often starts with worry then it ends in shame / I’ll handle all the money and you do you / Just know that if you cross me, I’ll erase you from everything.” But it holds out a glimmer of hope for real human connection; “I’m ready to open up to you” despite it all, Corum sings.
“Comfort in Illusion” and “Three Months” deliver the kind of epic musicmaking that Head with Wings excels at, creating an emotional stew that mixes confessional desperation with a kind of triumphant strength, suggesting that we’re listening to the voices of survivors. The message appears in the lyrics, too. “Life is a struggle / We’ve been here before, as the crisis goes ignored / Without intervention,” Corum sings on “Comfort in Illusion.” “Crawl out of the rubble / don’t spend your life asphyxiated.” But then, Corum sings, at the very end of “Absolute Zero,” the last song on the album, “there’s a black hole / A black hole in Galaxy.” It brings Head with Wings, thematically, back to their first album, as the music still makes room for compassion, to acknowledge loss.
If Head with Wings is about crawling out of darkness toward the light, the New Haven-based band Laini and the Wildfire is about living in the light all the time. On “You, Me, Us (and Mexico),” — the first song from the recently released Hold On to Your Soul — the vocals come in right away, over sunny piano, guitar, and drums. “I been reminiscing lately,” they sing. “missing how I felt when we met / Every day electrified / headfirst, just falling blind / living every day like our last.” The lyrics are technically about a breakup, but the music gives absolutely no sense that the singer is too shaken by it. Maybe she misses her lover. But her love for life itself is undiminished.
The four-piece of Laini Marenick on vocals and keys, Mark Marenick on guitar and backup vocals, Rob Siraco on drums and backup vocals, and Will Talamelli on bass has been making music that feels good for at least eight years, and Hold On to Your Soul suggests the band isn’t slowing down. The titular track is, as promised, a slice of classic soul. “Love Is Just a Lonely Road” takes a page from the Beatles to create a jaunty, swinging ballad with some richer harmonies thrown in for good measure.
“Where the Wind Blows,” meanwhile, shows that Laini and the Wildfire aren’t a throwback, with its rhythm shifts, rapid-fire vocals, and big hooks. Together the opening hooks set the tone for the party that follows, whether the strutting riffs on “Dime,” the swaying, slow-dance number “Say It with Love,” the expansive “Big Ben,” the sparse, grooving “Wayward Thrill,” the stripped-down, aching “Call You Home.” By the time the listener reaches the last song, the musically playful “Water and Sand,” the message is clear. “No one can love you better than you do,” Marenick sings, and in the Wildfire’s hands, that’s not a statement of solipsism, but strength and — dare we say it in these times — happiness.
