Wild Flag: "Glass Tambourine"

Was anyone else starting to believe that the very existence of Wild Flag was but a dream? It sounds like some Inception shit: a band featuring two of the three members of the beloved, woefully defunct Sleater-Kinney (Carrie Brownstein and Janet Weiss) with the husky-voiced guitar goddess Mary Timony on lead vocals and Elephant Six alum Rebecca Cole on what were sure to be some tunefully psychedelic keyboards. With no recorded music to their name, potential fans got excited about news of Wild Flag practicing the way you would reports of Spring Training after a long, dull winter. As the band began to play their first shows in and around Portland, the fervor continued to mount. But at last, here is what we’ve been waiting for, “Glass Tambourine”: empirical, recorded proof that Wild Flag is not merely a fiction that Leo constructed from our wildest rock ‘n’ roll daydreams and planted inside our collective consciousness—a document asserting that Wild Flag not only exists, but is just basically as awesome as you’d hoped.

“Glass Tambourine” shows Brownstein’s guitar stylings continuing to develop in the vein of towering psychedelia displayed on Sleater-Kinney’s epic swansong, “Let’s Call It Love.” Her riffs are commanding and Clapton-esque, swelling in bouts of pre-chorus mayhem and then subsiding to a steadfast crunch to make way for the low pitch of Timony’s warble. Weiss follows a similar dynamic: she sneaks her best and showiest fills in the spaces between the verses and choruses and backs Timony with, what else, some steady tambourine hits. Comparing Timony to Corin Tucker is futile, except to say that it’s interesting to hear the small alterations in Brownstein and Weiss’s dynamics and phrasing when accommodating a vocalist who’s interested not in brute force but a style that’s quieter and more enigmatic—but no less powerful. Both live and on the record, the most impressive thing about Wild Flag is that their deft interplay between each player’s distinct style and mood; live in particular, this is best expressed in the interlocking elements of Brownstein and Timony’s guitars.

The recorded “Glass Tambourine” is solid, but in my mind it’s haunted by memory of the version I saw them perform live last week: a freewheeling, damn-near-ten-minute jam that saw Timony swinging her guitar wildly above her head and Brownstein, on the ground, evoking a Hendrix-style solo so convincing I was almost expecting her guitar to burst into flames. Though it’s been torture for their fans, Wild Flag have been smart to put off recording their debut until they’ve worked out their sound and used the live stage to explore the furthest extremes of what they can do. “Glass Tambourine” is a fine teaser of what’s to come, but what if this band only continues to get better and, when it finally arrives, their debut LP is able to capture even half the energy of their live show? Pinch me.