CS Edition of 100.

$11

Our last album with Burlington VT’s Wren Kitz, Early Worm (FTR558), came out in late 2020 at the height of the pandemic’s buzz-kill. It was a splendid full band expansion of Wren’s earlier recordings, but kept a bit under the radar as did so many other fine records released during the plague years.

Now we are chuffed tom present, The Thinker, which is a wonderfully massive form-move for Kitz’s sound, embracing a full-blown studio sound hearkening back to song-based sophisto-psych-pop classics. There are touches that recall everything from Saucerful of Secrets Floyd to Ned Collette’s Old Chestnut to Fraser & DeBolt’s With Ian Guenther. But while there are a lot of odd and varied examples of approaches to recording, the kernel of Wren Kitz’s sound is — as always — his songs.

Wren’s lyrics often seem to possess a dark rurality, even if they aren’t overt in displaying it. His songs speak to interpersonal relationships and their place in the great scheme of things with the same sort of approach to (and denial of) modern culture that inhabits much of Neil Young’s work. And the way the orchestrations veer from electric rock band to tape-shaped post-modern-landscaping create the sorts of transitions that make sense to your ears, but seem wildly illogical if you really examine them.

Kitz’s chameleonic approach works brilliantly on The Thinker. His absolute rejection of hewing to the strictures of genre give him the freedom to present the tunes in whatever way he thinks they’d sound best. And some of his inventions — like the weird-ass dance break in “A Quill to the Quiver” — manage to fit perfectly despite making no goddamn “sense” at all.

I can’t think of anyone else who is producing music quite like Wren Kitz’s, these days and that is saying something. Give yourself a goddamn treat and check it out. You  deserve it.

–Byron Coley, 2024