Album Review: Laughing Matter by Wand

Wand's last album, Plum, ended with a soft lull on Driving—the expansive blues-rock finale culminated into a spiritual finish. It also left some uncertainty as to which direction the LA quintet would go next, given that they'd been gradually abandoning their garage-rock beginnings. The result of this change is rather explicit on Laughing Matter opener Scarecrow—groove-inflected psychedelia alongside a fluid, tempered atmosphere.

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Roughly a year after the release of their EP, Perfume, and a little less than two since their fourth studio album, Plum, California garage rock ensemble Wand offer Laughing Matter, a whirling combination of fuzzy guitars and delicate melodies. With each release, Wand have been exploring new territories, pushing their sound into different avenues of psychedelia.   While Wand's earlier releases were characterized by their grungy garage rock sound (in the same realm as contemporary Ty Segall), Laughing Matter finds the band taking their ….

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The visual language of psychedelia is awash with tie-dyed skies and third eyes, but nothing is so psychedelic as emptiness. On their fifth album in six years, Wand demonstrate their understanding of this truth. Their first three albums came out in a neon blur, spilling over with ideas, but as they slowed down, their music opened up. They used the extra time between releases to subtract, not add, and Laughing Matter continues the band's elevation via excision.

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Beginning in 2013 as a gnarly psych band with garage tendencies, Los Angeles' Wand quickly made several albums of weird and suffocating music. They ran with the quickly evolving scene that included Ty Segall and Mikal Cronin, and bandleader Cory Hanson's songs fell into similarly scuzzy territory. A shift began in Wand's sound around the release of 2017's Plum, the first album from the group to reflect a new lineup and a new democratic approach to songwriting.

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