The Wrens

Charles seems quite clearly to be the problem, from the available info.

idk it's hard for me to take the side of a big pharma exec, a career of evil

Ⓓⓡ. (Johnny Fever) at 10:28 16 Nov 21

I really like this one, and it reminds me in a weird way of Clint Conley's non-Mission of Burma band Consonant.

I love that band!

i'm just so fucking bummed about about this. the long Independent piece says the best Bissell tracks are "astounding" and it just sucks that it all came to this. the most fucking wrens ass shit.

kevin's album is out tomorrow and the latest track from it is excellent

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uaGZMXKWwP8

charles better come through with his own album before too long lol.

I feel like in many years we’ll someday somehow get the “lost album” as it should have been.

probably in like, two decades given the time scales they operate on

charles has promised to release the intended tracklist too so people can frankenstein it out of his solo album & kevin's for the time being

I listened to some of The Meadowlands again - feels even more bittersweet than ever before. Not sure if this is good or bad, as bittersweetness is the essential character of the record. Probably a good thing to not get too nostalgic about anything.

Everyone Choose Sides still slams extremely hard.

aeon station album is really good but you can very much tell it was recorded in two parts 7 years apart lol

I enjoy it very much!

this was posted https://www.stereogum.com/2171393/the-wrens-next-album-wont-actually-be-released-as-a-wrens-album/news/ but also charles is in the comments

still haven't been able to bring myself to listen to the aeon station as yet

^^ the wrens performance mentioned in the comments of above article https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IVhtnCNZgAk

I never really enjoyed this band's music until earlier this year when I listened on headphones

The hard-panned dual guitar thing is really awesome

No big official announcey thing until Oct. buuuut…did return from a wonderful family vacation to find test pressings, my first in 40+ years of bands&music, in the mailbox… pic.twitter.com/CBa3jxvSX0

— the wrens (@thewrens) August 31, 2023

the charles solo album is finally complete after all this time

It's been a crazy day, so no Meadowlands-20th-Anniversary-Stuff-You-Prob.-Didn't-Know post until tomorrow, but 'good' crazy - even though album/label/new project is nearing announcement (oct. 6th), even though vinyl is at a pressing plant, etc...

— the wrens (@thewrens) September 15, 2023

proper announcement coming october 6...

he's also posting some interesting trivia about the making of the meadowlands to celebrate its 20th anniversary

meadowlands 20th-anniversary crap you didn't know #3: the twelfth-and-a-half song. Coming out of 13 Months In 6 Minutes, there's this other song that briefly pops up, settles in & immediately begins fading out. It doesn't have a name and there's obv. no start ID/track number.

— the wrens (@thewrens) September 12, 2023

meadowlands 20th-anniversary behind-the-scenes trivia story #2: The preacher dialogue that comes in at the very end of Ex-Girl Collection, is actually not a sample dropped in there as you might assume (super common in say,the '90s, less so by the time this record was finished).

— the wrens (@thewrens) September 11, 2023

additionally, an in-progress version of the unreleased 4th album from 2014 recently leaked, or something like that anyway, idk exactly what the context of it is. the files i have are labelled 'album 4.5 demo'.

lol holy shit these versions are rough sure but it is basically the album

ok sub pop/the rest of the band really should have just insisted on bringing in a producer to sift through all of this and give charles some perspective because this is brilliant even if the mixes are really rough

should have just insisted on bringing in a producer

maybe kevin shields?

i'm pretty sure bissell has already spent more time going mad over these songs than shields did with m b v

certainly looking forward to his solo album for the finished versions of most of these tracks & more but it's absolutely tragic it's never coming out in this form. the the versions of some of kevin's songs here are better than the versions on the aeon station album

but still holy shit!!! the 4th wrens album, which i thought we'd never hear, is fantastic and totally lives up to expectations even in this slightly rough form.

is this how people who liked m b v felt

Haha can you share? Soulseek producing zero results

if you search for 'wrens album 4.5 demo' you should be able to find it on soulseek

this is the tracklist:

Intro
Dog End June Twice Measured
Old Death
Leaves
In Pairs to the Palestra
Face Facts
Maille Singing Old Death The G
Crescent
As Ive Known
Haiti
Three Types of Reading Ambigui
Sophie
Gregs Ballad
And Its All Guns & Arrows
January Piano
Its The Whole Thing, Its The
December Sleep
White Fem Age 61

some of the track titles were cut off and idk what they're all supposed to be. "Its The Whole Thing, Its The" is known to be actually titled "At Irish Exit". it's "Three Types of Reading Ambiguity" obviously. "Leaves" was on the Aeon Station album almost unchanged, along with "Face Facts" (retitled "Air") and "Haiti" (retitled "Empty Rooms"). "Sophie" was re-recorded as "Queens".

OK yeah it popped up... weird that "wrens 4.5" didn't work but that did

i can't wait to hear how charles has ship-of-theseused all these songs in the decade since (if these versions really are from 2014) as well as the new songs that are going to be on it. i hope they're also all 7 minutes long and have these sort of ambitious ideas

I was one of the people that went to his house and listened to cuts in his lil studio room years back, where he personally told us that he was going to submit it to the label and it would be out within 6 months from there or whatever, then I came back here and was like “I think it’s really happening guys”... anyway these sound familiar and I wonder how different they are from the samples we heard or if they’re the same more or less, it’s hard to remember. Can’t imagine anything he’d have landed on anything relatively minimal or simplistic after all this.

Yup, it was 2017. Sigh.

there are two versions of "three types of reading ambiguity" that he previously released in 2015 and they're both relatively close to this, though one is two minutes longer and the other is a minute longer. both have a bunch of kalimba overdubs that aren't on this one at the very least. the final version is going to have kevin's bridge cut out though (it's "hold on" on the aeon station album) and i think he mentioned scrapping some of the verses at some point? he also released an instrumental of "at irish exit" in 2016 and he's clearly swapped a lot of the guitar parts there compared to this one. there were other fragments of songs that he posted on soundcloud after bits and pieces got cut from the album (a scrapped bridge from "and it's all guns & arrows" among other things) but i can't track those down now.

also worth comparing the "crescent"/"as i've known" here to the version from 2010/2011 - he's added a ton of overdubs since then, including some great new parts, but it's also so much denser

ufo thanks for all this including the insight - but I gotta know - where did the leak come from and how do you know it was the version as of 2014 specifically?

i don't have much insight at all! i saw it mentioned on hipinion (lol) and found it on soulseek but idk where it came from or whether it really is a 2014-era version of the album (that's just what someone claimed there). the tags do say 2014 and that would seem to make sense with the other versions of some of these songs we've heard but that's very hard to say with any real certainty or anything

charles posted about his mental health over the past years ahead of the big album announcement happening tomorrow/friday

https://www.wrens.com/news-etc/2023/10/5/the-mh-post

very glad to hear he's doing better these days

https://www.carcolors.net/news/happyannounceday

charles walked away from his sub pop deal to revive absolutely kosher, and is also doing nfts of alt versions of tracks because he's somehow still excited by them

... of course that's how this would end up

but at least the album is on its way at last

Very sad the band couldn’t come to terms on a 20th anniversary Meadowlands reissue.

the final "old death" is pretty great except the drums are mixed real weird, they're buried beneath everything else. it totally realises the ambition of the leaked version otherwise, though there are a bunch of structural changes. it's fascinating how different it is, sounds pretty much totally re-recorded. such a shame this isn't the triumphant comeback single of the wrens because it really is a triumph

the alt. version of "and it's all guns and arrows" is lovely too, way better than the leaked version. you can really get a sense of how much time he's spent obsessing over the arrangements if he has alternate versions like this lying around lol, it's quite different to the early version and i wonder what it'll sound like on the album.

"i'll bear" rules too, and that's a track that didn't make the album!

car colors is such a bad band name though, idk if that or aeon station is worse lol

congratulations to charles for finally releasing some stuff https://carcolors.bandcamp.com/album/old-death

should also add https://www.carcolors.net/news/old-death-released-unto-the-hideous-world

here's the three songs, they're very good

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8X832hhLW-s

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GbUtB-MFNk8

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s5Rq3wHp7p4

"old death" is so fucking good. i really missed charles's voice

does anyone have a non soulseek link to the 2014 demos?