White Light Strobing

We Say...

Review by Jessica Suarez

Recent albums from Brooklyn’s Deerhunter and Crystal Stilts used dense, all-encompassing reverb as a backdrop for their rock and pop interventions. That echo implies a specific place of residence for their music — a tiny one-bedroom in an overcrowded borough. But Olympia’s Desolation Wilderness is the Pacific Northwest answer to New York's claustrophobic rock; their songs argue that guitars bounce off mountains just as well as apartment walls.

The actual terrestrial Desolation Wilderness is a vast patch of open land near the Sierra Nevada, full of granite peaks and shallow lakes carved by glaciers. It's a place people go to get away. Similarly, songs like "And All the Boys Looked" exhale loneliness — every guitar chord is lovingly isolated and deliberately downstroked. Its parts exist apart, their reverberations standing parallel rather than blurring together. Like Low, Desolation Wilderness prove that slow doesn't mean stop. Main member Nicolaas Zwart yearns for momentum — "USA Highway," "Come Over in Your Silver Car," "Leaving Song" all hint at travel. The rhythm on "Road Song" is as significant as a mic brushing against a sleeve, the exact pace of yellow lines whooshing under your left side mirror. Zwart's the only thing holding Zwart back; if everything's urging him to take a step, his soft voice (often wrapped in tape delay, glockenspiels, or both) says "Wait." You have to, for example, stand completely still to hear any of his lyrics on "Jupiter." White Light Strobing the kind of road trip album meant to be enjoyed after the passengers have passed out and the only things still moving are the road and the dark.