by Dan Goldin (@post_trash_)
There’s always something special about an album that defies expectations. While Wurld Series’ last album, 2021’s What’s Growing, presented a uniquely muscular version of jangle pop that was thick with fuzz and ever thicker with hooks, the Christchurch, New Zealand quartet’s latest is something else entirely. They haven’t abandoned the sound that led them to this point, but it’s morphed into something new, their classic Kiwi jangle mutated with psychedelic folk, Canterbury prog, and field recordings to paint something cosmic but grounded. The Giant’s Lawn is something spectacular, a record with a natural feeling of awe, like the sun shinning from deep within in the forest woods. Their third album is ambitious, but it never feels like they set out with ambitious intentions, the songs are following a path, treading space and time with a steady atmosphere of wondrous permanence.
With a masterful brushstroke of folk charm, light dissociation, and gluey power-pop crunch, Wurld Series are covering all the bases, dipping down the rabbit hole one moment before peeling into superb indie fuzz the next. They’ve made an album that’s often complex in structure, with layers of mellotron, organs, saxophone, and synths weaving between guitars, bass, and drums, but the feel remains intrinsically accessible. For as strange as the detours may be, this is ultimately a psych pop album, with bright melodies, and buoyant hooks at its core. It’s in the details that Luke Towart and co. really bring this one to a mesmerizing place, complimenting their radiant indie pop bliss (“Queen’s Poisoner”) with song’s that embrace the outside world and it’s vast unknown (“Alive With Flies”). As they dip between the surreal and the immediate, the album’s amorphous shape slips and slides, the journey fused to the path less traveled. There’s a sense of familiarity that’s paired with progressive experimentation, a near constant back and forth that serves to create a landslide effect.
When the going gets weird, the weird gets going, creating some of the finer moments of The Giant’s Lawn. Following some of the record’s more straightforward gems (“Lord of Shelves,” “World of Perverts”), the band dip into a realm of infinite possibility at the album’s molten center. There’s the seismic tension and wonky Casiotone of “The Pugilist,” a song that lands somewhere between saloon keys and cinematic whimsy. There’s the stunning orchestral mellotron lead of “The Giant’s Lawn Part II,” with rattling percussion, lush acoustic guitars, and it’s constant whir, a song that seems to chase malaise with impossibility, the idea of the fantastical captured as Towart sings, “thin skinned and bored, looking for an exit, an interior door” just before the song opens into a heavenly yet disjointed psychedelic surge. They move further outward, embracing Atom Heart Mother era Pink Floyd on the instrumental “A Private Life,” a song that combines sparse acoustics, Stylophone, and field recordings of both frog ponds and anxious cats. It’s a delightful culmination to the moments that proceeded it, and a perfect introduction to the swarm of mellotron and bleeding sax that make up the dazzling yet somewhat abrasive skronk of “Alive With Flies”.
Wurld Series still rely on the strength of blown out guitars and the power of a syrupy melody from time to time, piercing through the majestic haze on songs like “Resplendent Fortress” and the brilliant “Friend To Man and Traffic,” a song that seems to explore the growth and innocence of a tree alongside the highway. “Illustrious Plates” nearly sounds like a Gary Numan song (think “Are Friends Electric”) while “Not The Muscle of the Heart” starts off akin to a lost Pavement tune before it becomes delightfully unglued. The drum machines channel auxiliary percussion like wood blocks and shakers while the blistering feedback of the guitars are set to permeate. Towart and Brian Feary ride the overdriven pulse into the sunset, gentle and jangly, but bristling with undeniable force.
If the album moves in moments between magnificence and brute pop charm, The Giant’s Lawn concludes with another glimpse into bent reality, once more embracing the psychedelic folk and patchwork disorientation of the framework. “A Fanciful Assault Vehicle” opens with a distant lo-fi recording before opening into a subterranean warble, a dreamscape that’s both lulling and undeniably askew. For every influx of acidic folk, Wurld Series never lose scope of the greater whole, they’re skipping along the edges of this reality, with one foot in and one foot out, but the conceptual element feels impeccably balanced, a visionary trail from mysticism back to the natural world.