“From Dust” came Wild Blessing, and to dust they shall return, but not before leisurely strolling through a lovely five-song EP of softly focused post-rock bliss and dreamy indie-pop abstraction. It’s hiding something, obscured by vaporous vocals and guarded with an abundance of caution, quietly weighing how much to reveal. The walls come down eventually, but not all at once with Wild Blessing. So, have a little patience.
Whatever’s troubling them, however vague its provenance, Wild Blessing is clear about its musical intentions on “From Dust,” carefully calibrating and resetting in affecting ways its fluid, melodic clockwork of acoustic finger picking and mutating electric guitar, warm synth embraces, gentle bass, and tattooed drum-machine patterns. Taking The Sea and Cake’s firm, yet yielding and muffled, hand off the tiller, they fall in, too, with The Clientele, assuming their graceful sense of style. They wear it well, like a Belle and Sebastian designed cardigan.
Drifting along with the slightly woozy and easy, atmospheric currents of a glassy “Glossolalia,” a sudden and subtle draft lifting heavy, inarticulate burdens off their shoulders, Wild Blessing also gets swept away by the motorik drive and tight folky turns of “My Guitar Always Sings,” intoxicated by the elegance of their own arrangements. The yearning romance of the title track, parenthetically named (Lara’s Song), is even more winsome and sincere, an expression of youthful innocence and purity caught up in a tangle of light sounds, whereas their hushed rendering of Strawberry Switchblade’s ‘80s lost classic “Michael Who Walks by Night” transforms the original’s brilliant energy into a wintry, inward-looking search for solace.
Read what you will into the upbeat, albeit tender and wary, closer “Diary of a Dream,” but it seems as if Wild Blessing has realized its capable of joy, even if its wishes go wistfully unfulfilled. That’s rare these days.
