One of the most surprising moments on Wild Pink‘s 2022 effort ILYSM was ‘Sucking on the Birdshot’, its avalanche of sludgy, distorted guitars sounding all the more dissonant on a record of profound tenderness and intimacy. Frontman John Ross finished writing the album after being diagnosed with cancer, and having since recovered, the focus of his songs seems to be on “moving on,” as he sings on the title track of its follow-up, “like the cold wind blows/ Like a train in the snow.” It should come as no surprise, then, that an experimental outlier on ILYSM ends up informing the primary mode of Dulling the Horns, at least when it comes to the guitars, which sound remarkably blown-out, massive, and crunchy. (Ross cites Weezer’s The Green Album as a reference point for him and Justin Pizzoferrato, who engineered the LP. Wednesday/Indigo De Souza/Hotline TNT collaborator Alex Farrar, who mixed it, certainly knows how to make fuzz sound good, too.) There’s an element of strain, of towering through bad weather, in the way a baritone guitar drudges the songs forward; Ross makes them sparkle regardless.
It’s this struggle to move along, to capture light, that marks Dulling the Horns rather than being resolutely “on the other side of it all,” as a press bio puts it. “I’m always searching,” Ross declares on the opener, ‘The Fences of Stonehenge’, grasping onto a sense of hope while sounding worn-out by rock platitudes: “The light comes from a million miles away/ And we get a little every day.” Ross’ lyrical lens on the title track begins romantically, with him observing the slow spread of the moon down the horizon, before finally and comically despairing, “How can there be/ Really nothing in between/ That big ass moon and me?” For all the crispness of the production, he’s in a perpetual state of confusion and exhaustion, cycling through foggy mornings and bottomless nights “because,” he figures on the visceral ‘Cloud or Mountain’, “waking up is how the trouble gets in.” He lays out the pattern again on the title track: “You put yourself to sleep when you weren’t even tired/ Slept too much now you’re wired/ You had too much when just enough/ Is an act of defiance.”
Ross is perfectly aware of how this weariness can seep into the music, recognizing that it’s now coming from a different place than when “a song came free with each new instrument.” Sonically, even beyond the guitars, he hardly pulls back, continuing his streak of albums that sound immense and luscious, with gorgeously dreamy contributions from Adam Schatz on saxophone, Mike ‘slo mo’ Brenner on pedal steel, and David Moore on piano. But the additional instrumentation is not just about adding beauty, whether it’s mirroring the blurry chaos at the end of ‘Disintegrate’ or the knotty truths of ‘Sprinter Brain’. When Ross does seem to get tired of a particular song idea, he doesn’t have the impulse to water it down or build it up, but rather stitches another one in: when he runs out of words on ‘The Fences of Stonehenge’, he opens the song up with a riff that barely lasts a few seconds yet remains one of the most memorable on the record. The final track, ‘Rung Cold’, spins through several ideas before landing on the one that leaves the strongest impact.
It’s evocative of the line that closes the opening track: “Made a life out of a detour.” In similar but more ironic fashion, the penultimate ‘Bonnie One’, which literally describes a dream Ross had about his friend Ryley (presumably Walker, who contributed to ILYSM), calls back to a lyric from ‘Eating the Egg Whole’: “Sometimes a dream ain’t meant to be lived in, it’s meant to be forgotten.” (‘Bonnie One’, which is under two minutes, could easily be forgotten were it not for Libby Weitnauer’s sprightly fiddle.) Dulling the Horns isn’t Ross emerging from hardship with a sense of clarity, but it’s in this frayed, listless, uneasy space that he manages to be both gritty and playful, letting in a whole song about the history of Dracula (and one of the funniest you’ll hear on the subject). And the relative aimlessness of the album doesn’t prevent him from homing in something poignant, like when he guesses, “There must be a long ass German word/ For when you’ve destroyed something good/ Something you used to love/ But had to let go of.” Dulling the Horns bears the weight of the destruction, but it’s also the sound of letting go.