Post-Frenz Container Buzz, Oliver Wilde
07 10

Oliver Wilde Post-Frenz Container Buzz Howling Out Records

28.02.17

While you could categorise his music as indie rock, Oliver Wilde’s first two albums established him as a fine composer. Steeped in fuzzy noise, his songs are nonetheless orchestral in their outlook, with layered instruments and imaginative arrangements. Post-Frenz Container Buzz, Wilde’s third full length, is his finest album to date – one of soaring musical passages in difficult lyrical contexts.

With many vocal takes laid down on a tape recorder from within a hospital toilet, the record was made in the midst of treatment for his unusual heart condition, one that has presented obstacles in Wilde’s music career for several years. The hiatus has provided a vitality to the new record that was absent from his second album Red Tide Opal in the Loose End Womb, which acted more as a continuation of the work heard on his debut.

Here there is heavy, crunching noise and pop-oriented belters that meld perfectly with his lighter, dreamier offerings. Opener Good Kind of Froze sets the record off with its pulsing cacophony of insistent beats and infectious choruses, whereas Smothered sees more familiar, but no less welcome, Wildean wooze that juxtaposes heavy subject matter with a detached surrealism. Big Black Chunk provides further inventiveness in its neat cutting and pasting of disparate ideas into a romantic, affecting six minutes. But it’s Klooker’s Feathered Trill that summarises the whole of Post-Frenz Container Buzz: a track of flickering, distorting imagery and startling imagination, realised as superb pop music.