Wand - Spiders in the Rain

"Since 2014, Wand have made five albums (and an EP) in the studio and a living playing on the road. Business/pleasure: the two sides of their (multiverticed, decagon) coin, flipping in the strobe light of ongoing self-actualization. And yet, by doing both at the same time -- making a record of them playing live -- they've now made their best one yet. How do you get Spiders In the Rain? Start by going all the way back to January 2020. Do you remember? Wand do. They'd been touring Laughing Matter for ten months. They'd done the coast, spanned the country, crossed the water twice, came back home and kept on going . . . driving, flying, occasionally floating (or maybe just thinking they were?), always on to the next town. They did all kinds of shows -- clubs, ballrooms, festival gigs with no roof overhead -- the songs expanding and contracting according to the dimensions of each day. Seventy-nine shows, and everything that was involved -- the miles that ran beneath them, the different places and people everywhere, the music as it breathed, making everyone change every night -- alchemized the band, and they drove deeper into their far horizon than they'd ever previously gone. The essential truth of the live vibe -- that it's always better when everybody's here -- was clear, so they booked a few shows more in Cali, from L.A. up to Marin. They brought along light and projections from The Mad Alchemist Liquid Light Show and Mike Kreibel and Zac Hernandez too, to tape everything -- to get the big-deck energy out of performances in S.F. and L.A., but also to draw it out of the margins in Sacramento, Novato and Big Sur. It all happened, too. Everyone brought their experience -- the kids in the audience and the folks behind the boards, all along with Wand, where it meant something different for everybody in the van. Packaged sumptuously with artwork from Sam Klickner, Spiders In the Rain is an arc of natural beauty and man-made abstraction inside and out, on an epic scale. Wand are orchestra and machine on Spiders In the Rain, one with the audience, able to get inside any dimension of their sound, whether its songs from their second album or their last one. It almost felt okay that they couldn't play any more shows immediately after, until it didn't again. But the change was made: when they started up again doing shows in December of 2021, the energy moved just as fluidly through the room and the band."