April 17, 2006
Mode Gallery, Davenport
By Sean Moeller

With the price of admission or cover charge or whatever you’d like to call it, to a Wilderness show, you get so much more and what’s great is that you can take it all home with you. Need not stay present to win, the door man should be required to suggest as you step inside, because what you’ll be getting is a trance-inducing dance show from singer James Johnson and at least a week’s worth of emotional uneasiness, the jitters some might rephrase you. It all starts and ends with the devoutly human, yet unmistakably beastly voice of Johnson. His lyrics – all of which seem to question or challenge our suspected cushiness and safety – come out in big blocks of haunting concern.

Here on Monday night, before a sparse crowd (do these Iowans even read Pitchfork? Do they even realize that in New York and Chicago and far greater places, they’d have a tough time getting in the door to this show, in the same week that both the headliners and the newest freak-rock dandies Parts & Labor released new albums?) Johnson showed his insouciance with a pair of jeans and a sweatshirt, copping to more of a guy walks into a bar after a long day on the assembly line type of demeanor. The things that Johnson must have pent up in him during the day get expelled in blithely slow ways, as if we’re watching a crane or a pelican take into flight, out of a marsh, in National Geographic speed slow motion. He never attacks, but gives off enough of a feeling that says he would if provoked. He does absolutely absorb what’s going on around him—Colin McCann’s tempestuous-to-sullen guitar work, Will Goode’s street brawl-to-warm embrace like bashing and Brian Gossman’s rich and fraught complements on bass. He takes it in as someone really huffs in the smell of pine needles in Christmastime, letting all of the activity soak into his fibers and his tongue and his teeth, then out of his mouth come words of ominous something. It doesn’t necessary have to be despair, but it usually does feel that way. And out of his arms come the sweet, mechanical moves of robots, as if he were karate-chopping underwater, in a swimming pool of blood.

Playing mostly cuts from “Vessel States,” out a week ago today on the mighty Jagjaguwar, Wilderness stood at the back of this hall-like art space, with oil-on-canvas paintings of zeroes on one side of them and oil-on-canvas paintings of Iggy Pop on the other, with the lights turned off except for a bright orange stage light, which pointed at the wall. They were four silhouettes and a see-through drum set, pacing themselves through darkness. Johnson couldn’t stand in one place for very long, taking his fluid and abstract dance moves on several explorations of the room. He took his mic stand into the crowd to sing back at his band. He went behind Goode and out a backstage door, where he sang two songs out of sight, getting him closer to the Styrofoam cooler full of Bud Light and turning his voice into a mysterious forcefield or the all-powerful howl of a sea lion impersonating a gruff preacher. You knew he couldn’t be lost. He’d already been here for a half an hour. When he sang, he looked off with shut eyes, and seemed to be watching a twilight dry, cautiously aware that now – with night setting in – was when he’d need the most strength.

Brooklyn’s Parts & Labor were exceptional in its seven and a half song (“Drastic Measures” had a re-do) support slot. Its smashing brand of keyboards-on-bass and drums-on-keyboard collisions was augmented by way-bearded B.J. Warshaw and scarecrow-looking figure Dan Friel’s tag-team vocals that carry a gang-way urgency. Chris Weingarten is murder on drums, staging snare massacres that would make Wounded Knee seem like a fucking picnic. His temperamental blitzing of his kit was a constant source of attention-grabbing wildness that still tied every song together. During the second song of the night, “Drastic Measures,” off the just-released “Stay Afraid,” Weingarten messed with his snare before throwing his sticks and hands in the air, like an umpire calling a foul ball. Looking utterly disgusted, he kicked his set right in the gut, picked up his snare and threw it to the ground. He then asked his bandmates for two seconds to fix it. They came right back with a complete version of the song and there was Weingarten back punishing his misbehaving drums mercilessly. The gauntlet had fucking dropped. He and the rest of the band stayed keyed up for the remainder of its short and snappy set of driving, twisted rock and roll that can only be categorized as a fusion of good and evil. They are tinkerers and roustabouts and wicked wizards with ears for that little pop sugar cube in the middle of a black cloud of static.