Wilderness - Biography
Hailing itself as “a band about trying to thank music,” Wilderness is a Baltimore-based indie-rock band that combines an artistic post-rock aesthetic with the cathartic vocal delivery of singer James Johnson, chant-like backing vocals and an unorthodox approach to typical instrumentation. As a four-piece centered on Johnson’s unique warble, the band—which also consists of Brian Gossman (bass), Will Goode (drums) and Colin McCann (guitar)—originated in Florida in the 1990s before working on music together beginning in 2001 after all the members had relocated to Baltimore. They would release their debut full-length album, Wilderness (2004), three years later on the revered indie label, Jagjaguwar. They have released three LPs in total, and have toured the United States and Europe. Wilderness has been compared to post-hardcore art rockers Lungfish, David Byrne and John Lydon-led Public Image Limited, the latter of whom—having never owned a PiL album,—singer Johnson says is nothing more than a coincidence.
Wilderness’s sound came about from Johnson’s upbringing Jamaican music and punk—but the band as a whole took things into more obtuse territory through years on coagulative thinking. As self-described “perfectionists,” Wilderness took three years to issue its first full-length album after becoming a band. The time they put into their debut album, the 10-track Wilderness (2005 Jagjaguwar) was well honed through gigging (including opening sets for one of their most frequent sound affiliates, Lungfish). Johnson’s long vowel-stressed emissions became the distinguishing element in the hands of producers Chad Clark and T.J. Lipple at Silver Sonya Recording Studios, in Arlington, Virginia. Songs like “Fly Father to See” and the opener “Marginal” were standout tracks on the record.
Though they’d taken their time for an official release, Wilderness didn’t waste any in putting out a follow-up—2006’s Vessel States (Jagjaguwar). With thematic screeds about the end of capitalism, indifference and beauty—and a delivery that verges on unintelligible the whole way—Johnson’s grave world-weary howl sets the mood for the entire nine-track album. Again mixed and recorded with the team of Clark and Lipple with McCann and Gossman working as the mechanics of an anxious rhythm section, post-rock tracks like “Beautiful Alarms” and “Gravity Bent Light” contained the kinds of wiry guitars and encapsulating percussion that had critics likening them to Fugazi and Lungfish, just as easily as they stamped them as uncategorizable.
For much of 2007 Wilderness was on hiatus but returned in 2008 with (k)no(w)here (Jagjaguwar), a darker and more minimalist album than previous material that was written in large part for a visual art piece of Charles Long’s at the Whitney Museum of American Art. Recorded by Pete Lyman at Infrasonic Sound in Los Angeles, the eight tracks on the album are really one continuous song that are again centered on Johnson’s slurring, shamanistic yelps—especially on tracks “Pablum” and “Silver Gene.” Only this time his pained voice plays over a backdrop of restrained instruments, half time drumming and Colin McCann’s sparse guitar, delivering it more readily to the realm of straight art-rock.
The band toured extensively across America in support of the release. Given Wilderness extremely idiosyncratic nature, the band seems poised to prove that the sometimes, “music and art can stand for itself” and that “music can have its own influence or gravity.”
