Pitchfork

At a more intimate Wrens show last year, singer/guitarist Charles Bissell came onstage with guitarist Greg Whelan-- but without the band's rhythm section-- and began scraping out a slow, muted, rhythmic passage on guitar, while Whelan scampered about the edges with a few spare, reverberating notes. Bissell started to sing, "Lock me in, tied to work," and a few whoops escaped from the hushed crowd, but it was a few minutes more before the entire house realized they were playing "This Boy Is Exhausted", a signature song for the band.

Skip back to 1999, when the band was still in label limbo and appeared on a Drive-Thru records compilation, with the preliminary versions of "Miss Me" (which would later become "Boys, You Won't") and "This Boy Is Exhausted", sounding nothing like that sparse live reimagining nor the wearily triumphant version on The Meadowlands. They weren't quite as formulaic as the rest of Drive-Thru's pop-punk-dominated roster, but just as brazen with their hooks; these songs were primed for radio. Wrens' debut and sophomore record, Silver and Seacaucus, have been out-of-print and hostaged for exorbitant sums by eBay and Amazon sellers for years after a somewhat-infamous, somewhat-acrimonious split from Grass Records, which would become Wind-Up (and home to Evanescence and Creed) following a change of ownership. At the time of the switch, new label president Alan Meltzer asked the band to re-record some of their songs with pop potential ("Bulit-In Girls" and "Surprise, Honeycomb" among them) from Secaucus for re-release and wider consumption-- a session which the band agreed to and dutifully carried out. Point is, Silver came out in 199fucking4, and while seven-year absences can make the heart grow fonder, the band has survived by proving themselves malleable...when not prone to self-sabotaging.

But you'd never guess that from only hearing these two records. Call the Wrens eager to please, and maybe leave it at that. "Eager" is a good word for Silver, a debut showing a band that listened to closely to a lot of bands of the era, though none more than the Pixies. "Napiers" marries quirk with skewered pop progressions and cutting single-note guitar lines, and "From His Lips" is an affectedly ragged vocal from Kevin while the band cops every trick from Doolittle they can.

"Propane" opens the record with a curveball, however-- a simple melody that has big ambitions, several different instruments briefly poking through the mix in a rare moment of understatement. It's what you'd think would introduce a low-fi triumph of a record. Silver is ambitious, certainly, but also extremely haphazard, roughly produced, and even poorly sung in more than a few spots over its 23 (!) tracks. All part of the charm, maybe, if they hadn't blown through every idea they had at lightning speed and given little thought to pacing or structure, as evidenced by disjointed and overreaching tracks like "Strange as Family" or "Me, the Misser, the Late". Even ignoring the misses, much of the record is marked by one-note quasi-punk like "Darlin Darlin", "Kevin's Hell", and "6", and a few better jagged pop toss-offs like "Leather Side" and "Behold Me". It can be an arduous listen to get to the gems on this record (though they're there), but chalk it up to the common and always-impossible mistake for bands to try and capture the energy of a live show on their debut. Getting an either-brilliant-or-uneven Wrens show on record proves an even more complicated issue.

There may be some who take to this early, rough-edged document of the band, though the supposedly clumsy dream-pop concessions now sound as if they predated the mood of The Meadowlands. Ponderous piano track "William" clears away the clutter and tugs the heartstrings, and "Gray Complexion" is, according to the brief introduction, Jill's favorite song and it's mine too, with a little "Dream On"-style guitar in the verse sliding into skipping triplets and swaggering desperation from Kevin in the chorus-- it sounds, for a moment, like a band finding its own voice. The same would go for "What's a Girl" were it not for crash-landing all its graceful momentum with a strange studio-patter interlude and some carelessly overwrought vocals. The band has no shortage of ideas here, but trying all of them at once bogged down these otherwise fine performances. But when it's on, as in the aforementioned "Propane" and in the calmer, less-indebted spots, the patience of their later albums shines through.

But while Silver is a bit better than its low profile, Secaucus is that perfect combination of a band that's discovered when at its hungriest. Scraping away some of that noisy artifice that doesn't date well-- and never fit them besides-- freed the Wrens to write a lean, layered, and near-perfect power-pop record, exemplified by shoulda-been-hits like "Surprise, HoneyComb", "Built-in Girls", and the lullaby-slash-flirting-manual "I've Made Enough Friends". The songs were sharper now, but more than that, it's worth noting that this is the only document of the band where they don't somehow sound hesitant.

Also worth noting that it's here the twin singers come into their own, and despite Kevin's leaps and bounds on highlights like "Built-in Girls" and "Rest Your Head", he starts to sound like a foil for Charles. Both of them have a newfound lyrical focus here: Secacucus turned small-town alienation inward and outward, from washed-up dreams and unfulfilled potential on the stately ballad "Won't Get Too Far", inability for long-term relationships over Beach Boys appropriation in "Jane Fakes a Hug", a brief spitting spite to scene copycats with "Indie 500", and, as a logical conclusion to all that, killing sprees ("Surprise, Honeycomb").

It's a stunningly consistent album, especially considering its length (and Jesus, these two are long records). Pacing was a lesson they'd definitely learned, among breathless punk-pop "Yellow Number Three" and "Hats off to Marriage" and the confident, smoothly delivered "Built-In Girls" and "Still Complaining". The record also included softer threads, notably "Jane Fakes a Hug" and "Won't Get Too Far", the bittersweet beer-swilling ballads that somehow become the centerpieces of all their albums even though their live shows couldn't be more raucous.

It'd would have been impossible to guess the Wrens would eventually mine something poignant out of resignation and self-referentiality on The Meadowlands, a record that makes a clean break from their first two. Old fans wondered where the mania and the tunes had gone, while new fans scratched their heads to hear the brazen, amphetamine-fueled upstarts on these earlier records. Maybe there's something universal in any hard-luck tale, but perhaps the perfectionist, self-sabotaging band laid bare in tracks like "Everyone Choose Sides" or "13 Months in 6 Minutes" struck a chord with other frustrated artists and writers-- it at least goes a long way to explain the length of time between the two eras of the Wrens.

Which is what makes this look back at the band all the more valuable: While Wrens mine a pretty narrow field of influences, all told, the fact remains that their fans legitimately have no idea what to expect from them next. Their only assurance is that no matter how they're played-- hesitantly, sloppily, earnestly-- the songs will be there.