It took several days of trying to finally get in touch with Wand singer-guitarist Cory Hanson. To be fair, the beginning of the Los Angeles band’s North American tour behind Laughing Matter, its third album for Chicago-based label Drag City and fifth overall, was busy in all the wrong ways.
The night before the first show of the band’s monthlong jaunt, Wand’s tourmates, Seattle experimental punks Dreamdecay, had their van stolen — with all their equipment inside — in Salt Lake City. It has yet to turn up, but the tour has gone on, with both bands playing on Wand’s gear.
“It vanished out of thin air,” says a still-incredulous Hanson, whom I finally caught up with for a quick phoner just before the two groups took the stage in Toronto. They’ll stop at Nashville all-ages club Drkmttr on Tuesday with local support from Ttotals.
It’s appropriate that Hanson’s been kind of a moving target, because so is his band. Wand’s story begins in 2013 at CalArts, the prestigious art college 40 miles north of downtown L.A. that Hanson and drummer Evan Burrows attended. Hanson, Burrows, bassist Lee Landey and since-departed guitarist Daniel Martens hit the ground running, releasing three LPs — Ganglion Reef, Golem and their Drag City debut 1,000 Days — in rapid-fire fashion over 13 months in 2014 and 2015.
Those familiar with that material, which cloaked its melodic sensibilities in punk snottiness and thick sheets of blown-out fuzz, might’ve had Wand pegged — and not incorrectly — as a limb from the California garage-psych-rock family tree, with Thee Oh Sees and Ty Segall at the top.
As good of a thing that Hanson, Burrows and Landey had going, the core trio opted for a road less traveled going forward, adding two members — CalArts classmate Sofia Arreguin on synths and vocals, and Robert Cody on second guitar. For 2017’s Plum, they overhauled their songwriting approach, turning it into a five-way effort.
“The earlier records, we were playing with different tropes, genres, anachronisms that were popular at the time but felt fleeting, flash-in-the-pan,” Hanson says. Since getting Drag City in their corner, “We’ve pretty much been like, ‘Let’s just take this as far out as we can.’ ”
Plum was a revelation, a cinematic 10-song cycle that ruminated as hard as it rocked, with Hanson throwing caution to the wind as a vocalist, letting his natural falsetto fly. The reconstituted group trusted its instincts as far as when to wile out and when to mellow out. It wasn’t easily pigeonholed — and certainly wasn’t garage rock.
“People were baffled, and in some cases upset,” Hanson says of Plum, “which was great, to me. It kind of whittled away the weaker listeners.”
Laughing Matter — a 67-minute double LP — takes things even further out, embracing krautrock in its pacing and use of negative space, and L.A. psych legends Love in its prettiness.
It’s looser and stonier than Plum, and there’s a reason for that. Just as Wand destroyed and rebuilt their songwriting process on that record, they did the same for their approach to recording for this one. They tracked it over eight months at three different studios, first in Joshua Tree, Calif., then at home in L.A., and finally at Sonic Ranch, just south of El Paso, Texas.
“We’ve always recorded in situations where there was only a finite amount of time, the clock was ticking and money was at stake,” explains Hanson. “That was how we made Plum. After that experience we were like, ‘Man, we need more time. This sucks, having to commit to things so quickly without having any time to really explore.’ So with this record we did the opposite.”
Reconciling ample studio hours with the spark of when ideas become songs is a never-ending challenge, Hanson admits. “We’d jam something on an iPhone or a field recording and try to re-create that. And that was the hardest part of the whole process, trying to find your way back to that sound without sacrificing anything.”
Live, though, Wand has never been more in tune.
“We’ve learned how to listen to each other, to think about each other, and that’s when things get interesting,” Hanson says. “That’s what I’ve always found the most attractive about good bands, is that they have this psychic sense when they’re a group together. They can move freely through intuition, and surprises will come out of that. That’s always the most exhilarating … to see a band feeling comfortable just ripping, going crazy.”
