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For some artists, creating music is a form of escapism, a way to add some excitement to the humdrum of the daily grind, for others its simply business, or an excuse to hang out with your pals, drink a few beers and meet girls, and for some, it’s a form of catharsis, a way to process the horrors and complexities of the human condition, not only for themselves but for their audience too. WREN fall into that last category.
The London-based quartet make crushingly cathartic music that spans the genres of noise, doom, sludge and post-metal. Having spent a decade honing their sound, they released their third album Black Rain Falls on Church Road Records in February. It’s a stunning piece of work that holds a mirror up to the bleakest elements of humanity.
“The world is so fucked up,” opines WREN guitarist and songwriter Chris Pickering when talking about the band’s writing process. “It’s absurd to the point to where I feel alienated from everything and everyone and I’m sure the other gents feel the same way. So let’s just write some music about what we see and what we experience. It’s like we become a conduit for how we’re feeling and what’s going on in the world and we’re able to create something so that it can be released and expressed, and not just be held on to and to manifest into something ugly.”
It’s clear from listening to Black Rain Falls that the band have fine-tuned their abilities when it comes to channelling their emotions into raw sonic landscapes. It’s a reflection of how the band’s individual members have matured as people and their sound has evolved with them.
As Chris explains; “Owen [Jones, guitar and vocals] and I started the band in our bedrooms, just playing silly ass riffs and thinking, ‘oh, that could be cool to make into a song’ but over time we’ve learned more, experienced more of the world. So the evolution of the music isn’t a deliberate thing. We’re always on the quest for what it is that makes us feel good when we’re playing it and lets us express what we’re feeling. We’re on the hunt for good tone, that is emotive enough that when it’s experienced, it can mean something. Our band is a constant ever-unfolding pursuit to reach ‘the thing’. And we don’t even know what ‘the thing’ is, right? But when we first sat down and listened to Black Rain Falls after it was recorded, we were like ‘this is the closest we’ve got’.”
The conversation is taking place over Zoom, just days after WREN have returned from a short run of UK dates to promote and celebrate the album’s release. The band took the opportunity to perform the album live in its entirety for the first time, even taking a sampler with enabling them to present the many layers and interludes that make Black Rain Falls such an enriching listen. “Every show was just great,” beams Chris, the memories still fresh. “We loved it. It was well received by the audiences too, which is always an added bonus.”
It’s a strange dichotomy for bands of WREN’s ilk who make such emotionally draining and at times grotesque music, to actually have a jolly old time going out and performing it night after night. Especially given the fact that Black Rain Falls in particular deals with such intense feelings of grief, with the band having lost a close friend to suicide while they were writing it. They dealt with the experience the only way they knew how, by pouring their feelings into the songs. But the band have learned to compartmentalise in a way that they’re able channel their pain into their live performances without it spilling too far out off stage.
“There was a time when we would start performing these songs, and I would have to turn away at the end of one of the songs and compose myself and Owen equally, would have these quite challenging experiences on stage, like mid-song. Some of the lyrics can be quite hard hitting for us, but we sort of reconciled with that, and sort of made the album more about the music rather than about that experience. And I think that translates quite nicely. Now we have this ritual before every one of our shows where we’ll have a toast of whiskey and get on with our show and just go for it.”
“It’s about processing,” continues Chris, thoughtfully. “There’s that moment of time from the beginning of the set to the end of the set where we’re concentrating and we’re making sure it’s been produced in the best way possible. It doesn’t linger, that experience, the pain and how complex it is experiencing the human condition. Either side of playing the set is back to normal life.”
In putting out an album as raw and intense as Black Rain Falls and performing it for audiences, it then becomes a way for everyone else to achieve their own catharsis, which is hugely important to Chris. “I want people who experience our music to come away with something that’s important to them and to tap into how they’re feeling,” he says. “I think our music might suggest a certain emotional landscape or emotional like experience, but certainly it’s for the audience to take whatever it is they need from from that encounter in the music, for sure.”
Black Rain Falls is out now via Church Road Records. View this interview, alongside dozens of other killer bands, in glorious print magazine fashion in DS119 here:
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The post Wren: Conduits For Catharsis appeared first on Distorted Sound Magazine.
