Wilder Maker

Brooklyn band Wilder Maker’s principal songwriter, Gabriel Birnbaum says that the group’s latest full-length, The Streets Like Beds Still Warm follows “an overall formal asymmetry, like dream logic.” It is richly textured, moody, and deep and is as distinctly narrative as it is literally experimental. To call it a concept album, as big as that term is, would actually be to sell it short. It is, in fact, only the first part of a concept trilogy that tells the tale of one long night in the city, from dusk to dawn.
The Streets Like Beds Still Warm follows a lonely narrator as he drifts down avenues and in and out of bars and hospital rooms. He thinks on big questions and bigger questions, gets into some trouble, worries about his sick father, grapples with rivals and competitors who could be his friends but are not; he orders cocktails, dreams he is a genius, thinks about God and fate and so on. The record closes out at around 1:15am, leaving the story to be continued. If this sounds a bit noirish, that’s because it is. “Film noir detectives always start out looking immaculate, but by the end of the film they have a torn collar, a black eye, their slacks are stained, and they’ve started slapping people around in desperation,” Birnbaum says. “Are they the good guy anymore? I find this fascinating and I love the visual cues reflecting the internal landscape.” While there are no visual cues, per se, on The Streets Like Beds Still Warm, the record owes a great debut to cinematography.
Impressionistic swirls of effected guitar, drums, and saxophone support Birnbaum’s husky and worldweary baritone croon which sometimes echoes Bill Fay. But at times, in all its dim-lit barroom storytelling, one may think of Tom Waits. It’s a comparison that threatens both to mislead and sell short, but it’s difficult not to see things while listening to The Streets Like Beds Still Warm –– perhaps a slowly swinging Tiffany lamp just above the narrator’s head as he’s a little more than half-drunk, scrawling a brilliantly poetic, antiheroic tale on a bar napkin. Be assured, though, this is not The Heart of Saturday Night and it’s not In the Wee Small Hours. In fact, The Streets Like Beds Still Warm’s musical precedents come from distinctly different corners of the musical universe. The band draws direct influence from the work of alt-jazz contemporaries Anna Butterss and Jeff Parker as well as ambient progenitor Brian Eno. One also hears echoes of Birnbaum’s series of mellow and dreamy Nightwater records, quasi-ambient four-track experiments. But while those beautiful recordings were solitary affairs, The Streets Like Beds Still Warm is certainly not.
The record builds on Birnbaum and band’s years of experience as improvising musicians, often well outside of the sort of “indie rock” scene with which Wilder Maker may be associated. It is, as Birnbaum puts it, “the inverse of the typical songwriter record.” Ambling, rambling, and dreamy, these songs were culled from open-ended sessions. Wilder Maker has boasted an intact lineup for over a decade consisting of Adam Brisbin, Nick Jost, Sean Mullins, and Birnbaum, as well as perennial collaborator Katie Von Schleicher. This record showcases their interplay and musical conversation in a way that the more straightforward style of 2022’s Male Models did not. To create The Streets Like Beds Still Warm, the group edited longer improvisations into more condensed pieces and then wrote over those pieces, “turning them into songs.”
Birnbaum further processed elements of these recordings, using relatively rudimentary tools like guitar effects pedals. “I wanted to lean into the things I love most and the things I’m best at,” Birnbaum says, “and away from any imagined expectations of an audience.“
Joseph Shabason, Macie Stewart, Chuck Johnson, Will Shore, Rebecca el-Saleh (Kitba), and Cole Kamen-Green all appear as well, each contributing to Wilder Maker’s sound world for the first time. These stellar players’ additions weave in and out of the greater conversation, drifting like crucial supporting characters, expanding and varying the record’s perspective and enriching the palette of the improvisatory source material.
The result is something patently hypnagogic, a bit psychedelic but not in a bright swirling colors sort of way. Birnbaum says of the narrator: “he may or may not black out later, or drink from the river Lethe and forget his past. Depends on your perspective.”
At times the overall shape and flow of the record recalls Oren Ambarchi or Carlos Niño, though it’s somehow still pop music or post-rock or indie folk or whatever else it will be called. But there is a freedom here –– freedom from rigid style, freedom from rigid rhythm, and also freedom from rigid commercial expectations which Birnbaum says has come along with his having recently taken on a full-blown career as a therapist. No longer shackled by the dream of “making it in music” (while perhaps simultaneously mourning the dream’s end), Birnbaum leads his band through more oblique passages, though his footing is no less sure than ever before. The Streets Like Beds Still Warm is, holistically, a statement of nocturnal and hypnotic storytelling –– a matter of both style and substance. Birnbaum’s investment in the narrative, which ultimately deals in humanity, is reflected by the dreamlike way the tunes themselves unfold. It could not work any other way.
In his famed, 10-year-delayed review of Van Morrison’s Astral Weeks, Lester Bangs wrote: “Maybe what it boiled down to is one moment's knowledge of the miracle of life, with its inevitable concomitant, a vertiginous glimpse of the capacity to be hurt, and the capacity to inflict that hurt.” To apply that statement to The Streets Like Beds Still Warm would be even more grandiose than talking about its being only one-third of a concept trilogy. But the latter is a mere fact. And the former, absolutely applicable. “Each song stays in one moment or feeling, but within that, they do not repeat much,” Birnbaum says. “There aren’t many choruses.” Deeply felt and finely focused, undeniably listenable but difficult to pin down, The Streets Like Beds Still Warm is beautifully strange –– and it feels like just the kind of thing likely to receive the praise it deserves a decade down the road.