People get old and then they die, and sometime during the first part, even your favourite bands tend to let you down. It’s a fact that explains rock ‘n’ roll’s most painful conundrum. Great musicians die young because they never get old enough to cease being great; bands betray you with a tedious, middle-of-the-road fifth album when they grow up, get rich and stop wondering what life’s about. Whatever the cause, at some point in their thirties the things that drove artists in their creative youth usually disappear. The music ebbs, the passion fades, then (as above) so do you. But within that, there are exceptions. Wild Flag are a prime example.
Since their formation in 2010, much has been written about Wild Flag’s members and the potentially overbearing legacy of their past. That’s not surprising because, back in the mid-‘90s, at least three of them counted as doyennes of American alternative cool. Janet Weiss and Carrie Brownstein are, of course, veterans of Sleater-Kinney. Rebecca Cole was in the indie-pop outfit, The Minders. And Mary Timony was the breathy vocalist in Helium, a group who, at around the time Sleater-Kinney were turning riot grrrl into galvanised, hook-laden joy, were ploughing the same attitude into something murkier, grungier, occasionally arcane.
Fifteen years on, you would expect most bands to offer little more than a faint shadow of these things past. Tonight, though, age and heritage become irrelevant from the first writhing bars of ‘Black Tiles’, Brownstein kicking into the air on the breaks as her guitar twists and bickers with Timony’s.
Most of the set, like last year’s eponymous album, is the stuff of pure intuition – a mutual familiarity with the basic elements that make rock ‘n’ roll warm, fervid and impossible to ignore. Songs like ‘Romance’, or the contagious, septic jitter of ‘Boom’ are compact shards of indie punk that repeatedly disfigure and reform. It moves, starts, stops and swerves effortlessly. At the end of ‘Racehorse’, the flicker of a strobe catches Brownstein’s silhouette, left arm aloft, her cupped, upturned palm balancing her guitar in the air. It’s a natural, iconically skinny vision that might have occurred at any punk gig since The Clash. It only really seems to matter now.
It works because, for all their distance from their ancestor bands, Wild Flag retain a connection with the fundamental things that made them right. Few Sleater-Kinney tracks could, for example, be accused of being love songs, but when in ‘Romance’ Wild Flag sing about love, it’s a version fans of the earlier band would still recognise, linking love to blood and sickness as if they are part of the same thing. That, of course, is an older version of romance still, from a deep, poetic tradition.
Similarly, there is a feeling that Wild Flag are citizens of any-when, inmates on some sort of cultural never-say-diers lifer wing. Even their less captivating moments sound compelling tonight because they never lose control. Less a band, more of an idea, this is music by restless souls, each song a series of reflexes and impulses. Most of it’s so good, it’s like they just wind it up and watch it go.
Words by Tom Kirk
