Wood/Water - The Promise Ring

Wood/Water

The Promise Ring
Anti- Records.

SCQ Rating: 75%

I once took a one-way bus to London with seven dollars and fifty-three cents to my name, landed a temporary gig back at an old job, and crashed at Zangief’s apartment for nearly a month!! What a friend! It was a fairly lonely time, living in someone else’s place without many friends in town, and I hadn’t any money to, you know, eat or anything, so I passed most evenings sitting on his balcony listening to records he’d left behind. Wood/Water became my record of choice; a contingency-plan for when I couldn’t make up my mind, as its simple rock grooves made my somehow dire situation much less anxiety-ridden.

Funny that Wood/Water is virtual therapy music, then; written by a man who was still shaken by the most frightful of circumstances. Upon a routine medical exam, lead singer Davy von Bohlen was informed that a tumor the size of his fist had been found in his brain. Following a successful surgery (and one giant, subsequently-deemed benign tumour later), Bohlen re-evaluated Promise Ring’s linear output and inspired by a one-off session that produced ‘Say Goodbye Good’ – a track unlike their emo-upbringings – the group began writing true-to-form rock songs. The “nervous energy”, as Bohlen refers to it in ‘Get On the Floor’, of past albums is replaced by meditative slow-burners (‘Half Year Sun’) and fuzz-ridden, mid-tempo rock (‘Size of Your Life’, ‘Suffer Never’). The trauma of his recent past is scarcely evident as far as genuine details go, but a new appreciation for life is clear on ‘My Life is At Home’ and the contented ‘Bread and Coffee’. The angst and ironic smirks of his emo days may be replaced by honest songcraft, but Wood/Water is hardly mush, and delivers some of their most memorable, genre-unaffiliated work.

As the record carries such an easy-going, pedestrian vibe, it’s hard to criticize Wood/Water for appreciating its own existence so. Like most Nada Surf albums, this is standard meat & potatoes rock, as functional as a good head nod and best heard on those lazy summer evenings. Having long left that questionable state of unemployment, however, I can attest that Wood/Water sounds much better when you’re not starving.