AEM008 Dan Wholey

Back in the rough and tum­ble days before we had music blogs and Mediafire.com and dig­i­tal dis­tros (basi­cally before we were walk­ing talk­ing media recep­ta­cles), peo­ple used to get their music the only way they could: by mak­ing it. On Sun­days, small town Amer­ica would gather in churches and liv­ing rooms and sing all day, in huge choirs of peo­ple, most of whom were trained in music only in that they did this every damned week. Dif­fer­ent singers con­ducted each song, so that there was no one leader, and every­one lifted their voices as much as they pos­si­bly could, whether those voices were rhap­sodic and pure, or pop-eyed and scrag­gly. You may note that I am throw­ing some seri­ously drippy nos­tal­gia at you, but Sacred Harp music, named after a term for the human voice which dou­bles as the title of a major song­book from the 1840s, is hard to resist as a metaphor for the good old Amer­i­can spirit, with it’s fierce demo­c­ra­tic meth­ods and com­mu­nity base. It also hap­pens to be incred­i­bly pow­er­ful and lovely, though it was never intended for a non-participating audi­ence. There’s noth­ing quite like hear­ing all those unabashed voices in uni­son. It takes a strange sort of ide­al­ism to think of tak­ing this method and apply­ing it to con­tem­po­rary indie rock, and that should tell you some­thing about Dan Who­ley.

The now-defunct Earth Peo­ple Orches­tra was the project in ques­tion, and the band was fairly beloved around Boston dur­ing its brief life. Ini­tially con­ceived of as a kind of open-source band in which mem­bers could freely come and go and any­one could par­tic­i­pate, EPO drew its strength from Wholey’s dis­tinc­tive, cut­ting voice and smart song­writ­ing, as well as the Sacred Harp style vocal har­monies. Dreamy, shuf­fling beats under­scored the cho­rus of voices singing gen­tly opti­mistic lyrics like “I hear if you believe it you can drive out ocean tides,” padded under­neath with har­mo­nium and organ drones and gar­nished with tin­kling glock­en­spiels.  The effect was lovely, but this being the 2000s and not the 1840s, Wholey’s ide­al­ism dis­solved under the weight of con­flict­ing egos and prac­ti­cal­i­ties (any­one who’s ever been in a band knows how hard it is to get three peo­ple to play a song in time, let alone fif­teen). Says Who­ley of his Earth Peo­ple period, “this is sort of a cool idea on paper but once you do it for a while you real­ize that some peo­ple should not try to break the bar­rier between audi­ence and per­former even though it might be a cool thing to talk about after you smoke a bunch of weed. I did learn that you should only have two drum­mers if your band is being fol­lowed by tens of thou­sands of peo­ple trip­ping balls.”

The man is no stranger to dis­solv­ing bands, though: his three pre–EPO efforts, includ­ing Jack­son Plas­tic, a power trio with future Sad­dle Creek sign­ing Miles Ben­jamin Anthony Robin­son, all self-destructed with vary­ing degrees of vio­lence and hurt feel­ings, includ­ing one punch in the face (not thrown or received by Who­ley, for the record) that fed the Boston indie rock gos­sip scene for weeks. So, he sol­diered on, record­ing the music for var­i­ous short films, includ­ing I Think We’re Alone Now, a doc­u­men­tary about hor­rif­i­cally obses­sive fans of 1980s teen pop star­let Tiffany, and then pro­duc­ing six solo songs in only a few days, from the lat­ter of which this dig­i­tal sin­gle is culled. The style of the solo tracks varies widely, from long, crack­ling drones to piano bal­lads to lilt­ing banjo tunes with elec­tronic drums, and the only thread that weaves them all together is his voice, an unwa­ver­ing tenor with a nasal edge that, along with lyrics about stained moun­tain­tops, will surely bring the name Jeff Mangum to the tips of many jour­nal­is­tic fin­gers. Beyond that touch­stone, though, Wholey’s voice is arguably bet­ter, slightly lower and filled out with a greater coarse­ness and depth. The best voices are not often the most purely beau­ti­ful, and Who­ley, espe­cially heard live, is a per­fect exam­ple of how an imper­fect sound can cap­ti­vate completely.

A-side “Drain­dancer” bears some resem­blance to Wholey’s Earth Peo­ple style, with its slow shud­der­ing beat and stringed drone, made by what sounds like a down­tuned acoustic gui­tar being attacked with a cello bow, or maybe just a pick. The melody slowly winds its way down through the verses as if it’s too heavy to be car­ried, land­ing thickly on a few unex­pected notes on the way, while the lyrics lean in a more nihilis­tic direc­tion than pre­vi­ous mate­r­ial, with every image resolv­ing in a neg­a­tive direc­tion (fal­cons fly away, juice drips down and flows away, noth­ing remains, etc.), per­haps reflect­ing a tem­pered ide­al­ism after the col­lapse of the EPO. The lit­tle melis­matic flour­ish at the end of the word doubt is another lit­tle reminder of the power of the man’s voice, some­thing that we can hope might come even more to the fore in future recordings.

“Tiny Coals” hear­kens back to the power trio days of Jack­son Plas­tic, string­ing fuzzy gui­tar chords (again, hard not to think of Avery Island era Neu­tral Milk Hotel hear­ing the way Wholey’s voice rises over said gui­tars and rants about amni­otic sacs, though there are cer­tainly scads of other pos­si­ble ref­er­ences) over some heavy, can­tan­ker­ous drums, and keep­ing to the rel­a­tively slow tem­pos he favors. Again the lyrics are stark and per­se­cuted and lonely, with “I lit a fire and fell asleep and it killed every­one I know,” being the main motif, and else­where squir­rels devour­ing the narrator’s food and mod­els of the Titanic being sunk. Still, in the end, he is the one who lit the fire, which sug­gests that bleak though his posi­tion is, it’s entirely his fault. The fray­ing of his voice dur­ing the last held “know” is a moment of near ugli­ness, of a man try­ing des­per­ately to fig­ure out what to do next.

Fit­tingly, Wholey’s musi­cal future is uncer­tain at the moment. A pared down ver­sion of EPO is in the works, minus the ide­ol­ogy and half the band mem­bers, as well as a new power trio, and per­haps even some solo elec­tron­ics. It’s not clear at all where he’ll wind up or what direc­tion he’ll be head­ing in. The one thing you can count on though, is the pres­ence of that voice, roar­ing out the melodies with a blunt­ness that might call to mind the days when singing belonged to everyone.

Gabe Birn­baum

Side A — Draindancer Audio clip: Adobe Flash Player (ver­sion 9 or above) is required to play this audio clip. Down­load the lat­est ver­sion here. You also need to have JavaScript enabled in your browser.

Side B — Tiny Coals Audio clip: Adobe Flash Player (ver­sion 9 or above) is required to play this audio clip. Down­load the lat­est ver­sion here. You also need to have JavaScript enabled in your browser.

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