I’m not sure what I was expecting walking into Wand’s Toronto show, but I know after leaving it I felt like over the course of my life I haven’t been listening to enough classic rock. I’ve seen it in concert though, and therein lays the problem.
Classic rock is so tied to the nostalgia of the days when it was made that, as an outsider trying to get into the genre, seeing bands (or in some instances reanimated corpses) touring their “classic albums” well into their probably-should-be-retired days is less than enthralling. And, while the old music may hold up, it’s getting increasingly more difficult to find a band that’s able to retain the glory on recently recorded material. It’s not a genre that bands – specifically bands from the 60’s and 70’s – tend to emerge from. It’s where bands go to be immortalized for their peaks.
That’s what makes Los Angeles’ Wand so very interesting. If you went into their show on Friday night at The Silver Dollar with your eyes shut, you could just have easily of been listening to a lost Iron Maiden record from the band’s heyday. That’s because the four-piece are really (really, really, really) good at sounding like they just hopped out of a time machine from eras past – though they somehow manage to retain more recent psychedelic developments a la Tame Imapala as well.
It’s great classic rock, but it’s also great recent music. That’s something very few bands even attempt to pull off for fear of sounding like a straight-from-the garage cover band.Touring their sophomore album, 2015’s Golem, the band blew through eardrums with a set that had both the hipsters and the more typical classic rock fans clutching at their beers in anticipation of the next guitar solo.
Between an apathetic-looking guitarist, plenty of exaggerated hand gestures, and a roaring bass and drum section, the only reason Wand didn’t have a rowdy crowd was because everyone was too busy being awed. The law school students in front of me seemed to be having something of a quarter-life crisis, asking each other why they were in law school and not doing “cool things” like being in a band.
The obvious answer to that is the fact that very few bands manage to pull off what Wand can without it sounding like a terrible homage. But, between the band’s movement from fast to slow tempos and back again, plus an underlying heaviness that stayed in my head well past their set ending, it’s certainly nice to know that it’s not an impossible feat.
