| Popmatters |
 I watched a DVD of Frozen River over the weekend and thanked the good Lord I didn’t believe in that the protagonist’s circumstances were not my own. Released to immense acclaim at last year’s Sundance Film Festival, Frozen River plants its focus on Ray Eddy, an upstate New York trailer mom with two sons and a minimum wage job, whose husband (the boys’ father) has just run off with the cash Ray was about to spend on a new double-wide trailer to replace their current rat hole. Saddled with this promise to her family, as well as the daily struggle to keep them fed, Ray reluctantly enters the dangerous world of illegal immigration to make several thousand quick bucks, smuggling Korean and Pakistani immigrants across the US-Canadian border in the trunk of her car. Not a thriller, per se, Frozen River is a stark look at simple economic survival that just happens to be really, really scary. More than anything else, it’s a story about money—its power to hold relationships together or tear them apart—and a mother’s desperate attempts to shield her young children from a painful reality.
I thought about this as I was listening to “Talking About Money”, a song from Wye Oak’s stunning, sobering second record, The Knot. When people “talk about money”, particularly with children or significant others, it usually isn’t in a good way. It’s a discussion that people would like not to have, but which, for reasons dire and immediate, they must. It’s amazing how persistent Ray’s efforts are not to bring up the topic with her boys; she keeps shoving it away, as if she were trying to get an approaching mountain lion to scram by pretending it isn’t there. Her 15-year-old knows the deal ("There’s food in the fridge,” Ray says, to which her son shoots back, “Popcorn and Tang?"), but her 5-year-old is blissfully ignorant as she skirts the razor’s edge to make sure he stays that way. Still, the subject is always lingering in the atmosphere, waiting to be invoked. Likewise, the continuously shuddering guitar and repeated blow of the melodica in “Talking About Money” remind me of an elephant in a room, a dull ache that won’t subside until someone decides to address it. “What I owe you is more than how I know you”, 23-year-old Jenn Wasner sighs beneath the reverb. This is going to be a tough one....full text |
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| Allmusic |
| Wye Oak's second album follows the same basic blueprint as their first album. The Knot is straight-up indie rock with no surprises, but just enough inspiration to keep it from being strictly derivative. The duo (Jenn Wasner on guitar and vocals, Andy Stack on drums and the occasional vocal or keyboard) uses many trademark tricks of '90s indie rock like quiet verses/loud choruses, dynamic builds that end in guitar freakouts, and vocals buried in the mix. The '90s vibe is also heightened by Wasner's vocal similarities to Georgia Hubley of Yo La Tengo and the organic production that sounds like it could have (and maybe was) done on reel-to-reel tape rather than a computer. It gives the album a warm, intimate feel that only occasionally sounds a little murky around the edges. What the band adds to the equation is the soul that Wasner pours into her singing (and most likely her lyrics, though they are often difficult to make out). It sounds like there is a fair amount of hurt behind the songs on The Knot, and her hushed delivery of the vocals draws the listener in closer. They also wrote some songs that would stand toe to toe with the best music of the era they so clearly love; the lilting "Siamese" sounds like a lost YLT album track, the chugging "Tattoo" benefits from an excellent vocal line sung in harmony by the pair, and "I Want for Nothing" sounds like the kind of sweet and moving song Madder Rose wanted to record but never quite could. What keeps the entire record from being great, or at least the equal of their indie rock heroes, is the uneven quality of the songs. Too many are formulaic and hook-free, like "For Prayer," which rides the quiet/loud hook too hard, or the overlong "Mary Is Mary," which clearly aims to be epic but falls more in the merely lengthy category. Another problem is the lack of vocals from Stack; part of the success of the first album derived from the male/female vocal dynamic. The lack of it here takes some of the interest and variety out of the band's sound. Still, the record isn't a failure by any stretch; there is enough going on to make it at least worth a listen or two if you love the sound of 1990s American indie rock as much as Wye Oak do....full text |
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| Pitchfork |
Wye Oak's debut, If Children, was a small, surprising record. Surprising because it was the sound of two kids, barely 21, playing earnest, noisy folk-rock that ignored nearly every trend in indie music; surprising because it came out of Baltimore, a city whose indie scene-- lead by Dan Deacon and bands like Ponytail-- is publicized for its spasm and flash. Surprising because of the sympathy in Jenn Wasner's lyrics. Most of the songs on the album were about age and domesticity, and most of the time it was impossible to gauge how old or domestic the band was. The character of Wasner's voice flickered between baby bunny and bitter wife, and swelling, muscular moments in the music were as confidently handled as the quiet ones.
If it's not obvious that I sincerely love the band Wye Oak (and not for sentimental reasons), let me clarify that I do-- and so it's with bit lip and heavy heart that I report on The Knot. The record doesn't feel as varied or agile as If Children did-- which is too bad only because If Children proved they could make a varied, agile record. Songs rarely pick up from a crawl. Sustained guitar chords fan out and crush whatever momentum the band gets going. The bursts of distortion that colored If Children are almost pornographically expanded....full text |
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