Wasted

For a decade and a half, Wyldlife has rocked out to kicks and disaffection

Keith Richards once said—or he didn’t, who knows—that rock and roll is music for the neck downwards. Dave Feldman of Wyldlife said—just last week—“We are morons. Maybe the sharpest morons in the room, but morons nevertheless.”

Feldman may be playing up a certain persona. His Jersey City, NJ-based band—he’s out front howling, Sam Allen’s on guitar, Spencer Alexander’s on bass, and Russ Barrnett’s on drums—has been banging around for the last decade and a half, making noise that isn’t moronic, yet if given half a listen, might sound so. Invited into Little Steven’s Renegade Nation roster a decade ago, Wyldlife has released four albums—a self-titled debut (2011), The Time Has Come To Rock & Roll (2013), Out On Your Block (2017), and Year Of The Snake (2020); a new album, sorted., is out this year—and a couple non-album singles, all tuneful, hook-y, rockin’ stomps through adolescent boredom, adult ennui, drugs, girls, and variations thereof. (Drummer Stevie Dios subbed for Barrnett on the last two albums.)

A dozen years ago, Feldman remarked to Matt De Mello that “the three-minute anthem-type rock ‘n’ roll”—Wyldlife’s sonic specialty—“is just built on a timeless simplicity.” He added, “I also think it helps that there are a bunch of amazing (albeit overlooked) bands that are looking back to, not even necessarily older punk, but just rock ‘n’ roll in general. As a friend once told me, they’re not re-inventing the wheel, they’re just taking it out for a spin. Maybe that’s what music needs right now.”

And here we are again. Last summer, Wyldife released a teaser single for the new album, “Fast Dreams,” backed with a tear through Tom Petty’s “You Don’t Know How It Feels.” We’re in agreeably familiar territory. “Surface level, the song is about partying just before bed time,” Feldman remarked when the single dropped. “But more-so, it’s a point of advice to keep dreaming, whether you want to better your life, travel to space, or just be a mid-30s semi-secret rock icon.” Wyldlife formed “because we love rock ‘n’ roll, and we wanted to do something fun.” Feldman said way back in ‘13, a long road ahead of him. He already felt that his band had been “doing this for a very long time. When people started asking us to play house parties and come through their town, I guess that was when we figured that we should pursue this.” He added, “Nobody is getting famous like in the 90s on MTV anymore, but if you can pay your rent from playing shows around the country or beyond, that’s as good as it gets.”

Wydlife’s job description is embedded in their YouTube channel tag: “70’s-stylized punk/garage/powerpop rock and roll. If you can’t move around, move out the goddamn way.”

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Context is everything: one song’s uplifting lyrics might bedevil a listener’s down or anxious mood; another tune’s downbeat words push stubbornly against the listener’s elation, creating in that moment a kind of perpetual motion machine of intention and effect. This can happen on the dance floor, when a song’s ugly words rise to your consciousness only when you’re at the bar, thirsty, after having danced your ass off to it; this can happen when a mix tape or playlist suddenly sings very different sounding songs after a breakup, or after a joyful reconciliation; this happens when a song that mattered to you when you were a carefree fifteen-year old matters a whole lot less when you’re an encumbered adult; or it may mean more.

The best songs that Wyldlife detonate maneuver among these complications. “Lyrically, I guess I’m trying to have smart lyrics, but play it off like an idiot,” Feldman has said. (“That’s the Westerberg approach.”) More recently, he’s acknowledged that “complexity is not in Wyldlife’s shallow bag of tricks.” Again, I think that Feldman, who co-writes the band’s song with Allen, is playing off his smarts. He sings and the band plays with sincerity about issues one that could dismiss as juvenile, certainly well-worn, but the songs’ urgencies, even when presented with sloppy half-grins, remind us that adolescent stuff always matters—in part because that stuff’s sometimes pretty hard to shake off, as we get older and, you know, wiser.

In the great “Teenage Heart” from Out On Your Block, the band nails this dilemma. An old story with new cast members: she used to love the Vapors; she used to be his plus one; he hears that she still lives nearby. He knows that she’s lost to the past, yet he’s hoping that some shared sense of starry-eyed, youthful recklessness might bring her back—

Surprise I’ll never learn my lesson
I should’ve shaken off my adolescence
By now but I don’t know how or when

—and if he’s a little embarrassed about it, he’s also earnest as hell. As tight as the song is, it would’ve worked just as well if Wyldife has released the closing sixty seconds only. “Every time I’m reaching the refrain / I can’t help myself, I see your face again.” Round and round we go again, he sings to her, and to his turntable.

At his best, Feldman, who’s smart, sings with a knowing blend of sarcasm and open wound, snottiness and vulnerability. I hear a bit Richard Hell and the Hives’ Howlin’ Pelle Almqvist in there, as well as some David Johansen, especially these days. Elastica’s Justine Frischmann and the D4’s Jimmy Christmas are in mix, too, but I don’t mean in citing influences to suggest that Feldman’s singing is wholly derivative. He’s singing his record collection, to be sure, but in service of great tunes that barely keep pace with the very real problems that inspire them.

Dave Feldman, 2017

Sam Allen, 2017

“Keepsakes,” also from Out On Your Block, the band’s strongest album to my ears, tells another eternal story: she split, yet ends are always the messy beginnings of something else. The things she left behind, the stuff that the singer can’t let go of—her shoe, some baggies (“who took the drugs?”), bobby pins, pills, stray hairs, her T.Rex tee shirt, lipstick stains on a still-warm coffee mug—are intimately theirs, but curiously the listener’s, too, morphed into silhouettes of loss. And though they’re tangible, literally holdable, they’re also ephemeral:

You’re just a lost cause gone beyond a reasonable doubt
You’re a mystery that I couldn’t figure out
With your keepsakes

Subtract the Marc Bolan reference, and the lyrics to “Keepsakes” might’ve been written any time in the last half century. The song places itself securely in the long tradition of the baffled, heart-broken lament, and so the details matter less than the story, yet, as anyone who’s been deserted knows, the details are the embers that never quite die out. (The more details change, the more heartache stays the same.) I guess the musicians themselves don’t matter either, only the song they're singing, though I’m glad Wyldlife got together and banged out this, a fresh take on an ancient tale. The arrangement, with its herky-jerky changes and stops, drums on the prowl, and eighth note bass, strives to remain upbeat, but Feldman’s howling, and the song’s pretty angry, actually. Fun songs about sad stuff is itself a clichéd description of rock and roll and pop, and a damn good one; my head lifted when I first heard it. Wyldlife, like countless before them, turned to that bromidic paradox in “Keepsakes,” as a good a move as any if you’re heartsick.

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Wyldlife traffics in tight, three minute odes to kicks and disaffection. “Wasted” (The Time Has Come To Rock & Roll) filters the pop hooks of the Records through downtown exhaustion (“I’ve been drunk from the absence of stars / I’ve been high from the horns of the passing cars / I couldn’t even tell my left from right from wrong”). The affecting “Cuffed” (Out On Your Block) rides churning, darkly shaded, heavy lidded riffs (think Blue Öyster Cult in a dive bar) to tell mean-hearted if clear-eyed story about the darker impulses that we all share but wish away.

Their songs have gone slack on occasion. Too few on Year Of The Dragon stick with me; the title track creates some drama, and Feldman mines serious alienation and discontent with his gripping vocals at the end of “Get Well,” and the band’s playing matches his desperation, but you’d be forgiven for thinking that “Sacré Bleu” is a respectful cover of a Hives song (or maybe a co-write), and with “The Falcon” the band aims for quasi 1980s arena rock (imagine if Tommy Keene leaned really hard into ‘80s pop metal). Doesn’t quite work for me. But, hey, Green Day might’ve already written Wyldlife’s “Deadbeat,” from Our On Your Block, as “Sassafras Roots” on Dookie, but that doesn’t matter, really, as someone had already written Green Day’s song before them. Pass the bottle over here, and I’ll send it down the line.

The new material sounds terrific. “Bystander” is “a punk song, as it were,” Feldman says. “It’s a track along the exact lines of the material we’ve always loved listening to and along the exact lines of the material we’ve always loved to write.” (The Hives are again the template here, inspiringly so.) Better yet is “Fast Dreams,” a fast song about stuff—shared uppers, oblivion, fantasies—that goes by fast. Someone’s still holding from last night’s party, and the singer wants a taste (“Now hurry up, chop it up, turn the lights out”) of lights-out nirvana. “There’s a checkered flag at a never-never land and I’m racing for keeps,” he sings, ascending, just before the gang-sung chorus arrives, which makes clear the singer’s complicated needs:

I’m in the studio
I’m on the radio
At the release show
But you don’t hear me, though, in my fast dreams

He gets it, he’s been through it all, good times and bad, yet “you’ve got have a dream / ‘cause if you don’t have a dream / it won’t come true at all.” That kind of well-worn sentiment might gag a quiet acoustic number, but with Allen’s ringing guitar and ripping solo and Alexander and Barrnett’s muscular, excitable bass and drums playing, you’re so caught up in the rush that you’re hearing those words coming from the singer as if he’s only just learned the bruising wisdom. Yet that dream of his is speed-sponsored, thrilling but fleeting. As with all great rock and roll and pop songs what you take away is the chorus, which you’re singing, still, an hour later. Yet the song’s last, repeating words are you don’t hear me. Lost in a dream.

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“We can write smart and play dumb, and we do,” Feldman remarked in Thrasher back in ‘17. “You just gotta keep people guessing. The second they can label you is the second they lose interest. The smartest guy in the room is the guy who might look and sound simple but is a closet genius.” I’m looking forward to sorted., out in May, for some new smart stuff about simple things from these guys. I hope they make it out to Chicago.

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Photos, “Dave Feldman of Wyldlife” and “Samm Allen of Wyldlife” by Sid Sowder via Flickr