Wishy - Nature’s Pill Review
Wishy pack Nature’s Pill with irresistible hooks, though the songs don’t always give you a reason to return once they’ve lodged in your head.
Fuelled by the inherent weirdness of ‘being in an indie band when the world is on fire’, Indianapolis outfit Wishy abandon all restraint and fully embrace fizzy indie-pop immediacy on their second full-length album. Where debut Triple Seven felt like an amalgamation of the band’s best work up to the point of recording, Nature’s Pill feels more coherent and intentional. It’s the band’s first chance to put forward a focused look at what they want to be. What that is, it turns out, is the hookiest band in the world.
Opener and lead single ‘All the Rage’ is one of the year’s truest earworms. Inspired by an Artificial Go and Good Flying Birds show, it’s just as jangly as you’d imagine but also recalls Weezer in just how easily it finds its way back to the chorus. Wishy have a real knack for that: throughout the record, they take elements of shoegaze, jangle, Midwest emo and twee, and contort them into saccharine pop song structures to surprisingly great effect. A-side highlight ‘You’re Not Serious’ whacks you over the head with its blown-out vocals and layers of overdriven guitars, and has collapsed into something much more melodic by the time you come around. ‘Sensational’ blows up Ultra Naté’s house stormer ‘Free’ and rebuilds it through pop-punk pastiches and My Bloody Valentine-ish textures. The singles from this record have seldom left my head since their respective releases, and the relentless hooks-per-minute rate is well maintained by the rest of the record. Make no mistake, these are some of the most irresistible songs you’ll come across all year.
The drawback, perhaps, is that there’s a real danger that the catchiness becomes the whole point. These scuzzy indie-pop songs are delightful in isolation, but don’t always offer much reward for scratching away at the surface. You find yourself yearning for a left turn that never comes, be it in tempo or sound. The full-throttle pursuit of melodic perfection leaves little room for respite or dynamic contrast, which would make the record much more appealing to revisit and allow those earworm moments to sing even louder. There are times, such as on woozy penultimate cut ‘Kiss Kiss Kiss’, where the songwriting is sharp and intentional, but there are others where it verges on the superficial.
It’s easy to imagine how this could have been one of the defining albums of the year: you dive into these oddball indie-pop earworms and start to pick out moments of real sonic intrigue or a well-disguised line buried beneath a wall of screeching guitars. Instead, some of these songs have exhausted much of their appeal by the time you’ve listened to them once. The record doesn’t quite compel you to revisit it, but it does make Wishy’s next album a really intriguing prospect. There’s a version of this band that could be really very special, but this is a subtle step towards that rather than anything more profound.