A hard to categorize act from the suburbs of Boston who went on an extended hiatus after label problems scuppered their major-label debut Per Second, Per Second...Every Second, Wheat return from a nearly four-year layoff with the encouraging Everyday I Said a Prayer for Kathy and Made a One Inch Square. Reduced to the founding duo of multi-instrumentalists Scott Levesque and Brendan Harney after guitarist Rick Brennan's departure, Wheat have returned to the sound of their quirky self-titled debut: for all of the pop hooks evident in tunes like "I Had Angels Watching over Me" and "Move=Move," a noisily experimental streak takes precedence for most of the record. The whimsical "Saint in Law" sounds like it was performed on a pipe organ made out of cardboard tubes, while "Init .005 (Formerly a Case Of)" and "To, As in Addressing the Grave" meander across fractured rhythms, and "Little White Dove" and "An Exhausted Fixer" feature Levesque deliberately foregoing traditional concepts of pitch. Those whose favorite form of Wheat is the aforementioned major-label effort, or even the elegant chamber pop of Hope and Adams, might consider this willful album an exercise in self-indulgent noise, but in the context of the duo's career as a whole, it sounds much more like a deliberate stylistic retrenchment. Everyday I Said a Prayer for Kathy and Made a One Inch Square finds Levesque and Harney going back to their roots and, hopefully, learning not to make their old mistakes again.
© Stewart Mason /TiVo