Give a listen to "Civilian" (Merge Records), the new album from Wye Oak, and it might seem like the work of a very large ensemble. The album's dreamy sound feels expansive enough to dive into, with ample sonic nooks and crannies; it's one of those records that yields newly noticed detail with every listen.
But if you go to the group's Chapel Hill show this weekend, you'll see that Wye Oak is just two people. There's Jenn Wasner, who sings, writes lyrics and plays guitar; and Andy Stack, who basically does everything else. Of necessity, the live versions of the songs are pared from their studio incarnations. Yet they come closer to replicating their studio sound onstage than you'd think they could.
"By the limitation of our setup, the live and studio arrangements do end up drastically different," Stack says by phone from the band's hometown of Baltimore. "A lot of being in the studio is letting arrangements present themselves to us. In the past, that meant piling on more and more stuff because we want to be this big noisy band, even though there's just two of us. There's some of that on this record, but mostly it's an exercise in restraint.
"At the same time, we've gotten to where there's more complexity to the live arrangements," he adds. "We incorporate samples, some different electronic elements to get sounds that previously seemed unobtainable just because of sheer mathematics - the number of limbs we have. We've toured so much the last few years, we're much more comfortable and there's less discrepancy between recorded and live versions. But it's still a different experience.
"The point is, the song should stand up to whatever interpretation you throw at it."
It should be interesting to see how the coldly beautiful ambience of "Civilian" translates live. Between the atmospheric sound and Wasner's dusky voice, the vibe is distant and lonely. The closing track, "Doubt," concludes, "I believed it then/Believe it still." Professing a belief in doubt does seem like the height of lyrical ambivalence.
"Ambivalence is this record's emotional context, and it's a thread that runs through everything we've made," Stack says. "There's the idea that a person exists in several emotional spaces simultaneously and feels conflicted by trying to contextualize life within that space. The most overused way to put it would be 'melancholic.' But the extremes of joy, sadness, loneliness, they don't exist separately from each other. They're maybe much more correlated than you'd think. So musically, none of these songs are entirely lonely and none are entirely joyful. There's always a combination thereof."
That's a lot to have going on in a song, and it requires an adroit balancing act. That seems especially true when there are only two people trying to keep everything in the air. Do they ever think about expanding the lineup?
"Not really," Stack says. "Jenn and I have been playing together in this group and also a half-dozen other bands, so we already work together in a lot of different contexts. Wye Oak is the two of us, and getting other people involved would make it a different band. Never say never, but I still feel challenged by it in a productive way as we work on unlocking this puzzle. Our mantra has always been if we ever feel like it's not engaging us anymore, we'll bring in others and try other projects. We still feel like there's a lot of creative energy to get out."
