Wilderness Pangs

http://throwawaystyle.blogspot.com/2007/01/sustained-spectral-harmonics.html#links

Formed in the recent past in Baton Rouge, Louisana; Wilderness Pangs started out life as a Creedance Clearwater Revival tribute act. Originally a duo comprised of Randy Faucheux (Guitar, Percusion, Feedback, Anything Else) and Brandon White (Guitar) who shared vocal duties. Between those faltering early steps and the place we call now, they have evolved into a slightly more incandescant beast. in the process and in the words of the band themselves this process began when they took a journey to the centre of the earth and discovered a breed of fire breathing animal called gigantodons. A realm where rap music doesn't exist. Hokey stories aside what they did find at the centre of the earth was a more cohesive playing style one which takes notes from the overlords of the current psychedlic scene: Animal Collective.

Fast forward a couple of years and the duo were joined by full time bassist and drummer Jeremy Baptiste. The pallette of influences was extended further to include leftfield rap collective cLOUDEAD and the introverted psyche canvases of Spaceman 3 and the outsider acolyte of New York's Tower Recordings; James Toth (Wooden Wand). This enabled the unit to begin playing live and to flesh out those ideas collated over the embryonic stage of their development into a self pressed CD-R release. In late 2006 they also signed to German label Broken Ear with a view to releasing a fully realised version of the now out of print early material. - http://throwawaystyle.blogspot.com

http://prod1.cmj.com/articles/display_article.php?id=29547335

2007-01-26 11:30:21.317,
Story by: Taylor Mason

The winner of this week's CMJ SonicBids Spotlight is avant-garde noisemakers Wilderness Pangs. Though the foursomes consider themselves a pop band, the acidic folk jams of Wilderness Pangs far exceed those boundaries. Augmenting the absurd and surreal with strong melodies, they stand out as innovators, even if they just want to call their music pop. Check the SonicBids link on www.cmj.com for more information. Congratulations, Wilderness Pangs! - cmj.com

Thursday night at the Red Star I sighed with relief that rock-n-roll is still dangerous and wild. I was really afraid that all the wild honey had been sucked from the beehive and everything with a stinger had been shooed away because of insurance requirements. Local feral children Wilderness Pangs opened the night up with a howl. They play a mix of garage-rock tinkering, alternating between trashy-thrashy guitar stomps and alien keyboard noodling. I don’t know the guys in the band, but I’m guessing they have rather hip CD collections, with strains of icon bands ranging from Brian Jonestown Massacre to Throbbing Gristle to Animal Collective peeking out from the cracks in their songs – and this alone does not really sell me. What does sell me is the fact that singers Randy Faucheux and Brandon White are not afraid to bellow at the moon like the hormonal twenty-somethings they are. It’s a beautiful thing. Not everyone there that night was in for their brand of assault, but it definitely created a disturbance in the force that is sorely needed. - 225batonrouge.com

http://tigerweekly.com/article/03-18-2009/10645

By Kaiya Morrison

When Wilderness Pangs began, they were not a local band from Baton Rouge. They weren’t even a band at all and never had any intentions to become one. Rather, the search for the musical Blue Fairy began with two friends who thought it might be fun to make a little noise.

“Me and Brandon [White] would hang out and make music together, but it was really just banging on pots and pans to make noise,” Randy Faucheaux, guitar and bass player for Wilderness Pangs, said. “We never intended anyone to hear what we recorded, but we ended up making a CD and just sat on it for a year. Then, one day I was bored and decided to make a MySpace page and put up the songs. A bunch of people liked it.”

Doesn’t it always seem to start with MySpace?

“Then Brandon called me and told me we had a show to play,” Faucheaux added. “I said, ‘We’re not even a band; how do we have a show?’”

Ironically, the show that started the band that wasn’t really a band was held on June 6, 2006, a day better known as “6-6-6 Day.” To perform at their first show, which was a house-party, they needed to recruit a little help. Faucheaux and White then added Jeremy Baptiste (Electronics, percussion, saxophone).

“I met Jeremy at KLSU when we both worked there,” Faucheaux recalled. “We had the same music sensibility, so we asked him to join us.”

After several changes of drummers, the three eventually found Jason Spring last year, and the first of many more phases for the life of Wilderness Pangs was completed.

“He’s not just a drummer, he can take that hat off and play many other roles and instruments,” Baptiste said.

“Jason has really helped us realize our sound more,” Faucheaux added.

Just what exactly is the sound Wilderness Pangs is attempting to create?

Where the band lies now is a far cry from what White and Faucheaux first recorded in 2003. Originally they sought for a more folk aesthetic, but have moved into a more experimental realm.

“I think the word experimental is used a lot because that’s vague, but that really is fitting for us,” Faucheaux explained. “I don’t think we try to do things differently intentionally. We take something unfamiliar and make it familiar. We take something that people maybe haven’t heard before, but then we give it a song structure and make it familiar.

“It’s a lot of trial and error and getting into fights at band practice,” he added with a laugh.

Band practice, however, has become increasingly difficult over the past two years, which is the length of time White has been living in Austin, Tex.

“It’s made anything like touring really hard, but Brandon’s moving to New Orleans in the fall, so we’ll be in the same area, and I’ll be finishing grad school and we’ll all be getting to the point where if we wanted to tour, then we would be able to do so,” Faucheaux said.

White’s distance from the band became a crucial element for the recording of the band’s second album, a follow-up to the band’s debut album The Indivisible Squalor of Wilderness Pangs recorded locally by Fred Weaver.

“It was an interesting week,” Baptiste said when discussing the last recording session. “The first day we got to Austin we just jammed in Brandon’s garage and then the next day we took what we remembered and started putting it into a song structure. It was an awesome environment to record in because there weren’t any distractions.”

“Brandon’s roommate is a recording engineer by trade, and he has a lot of great music programs and helped us mix when we were about to pull our hair out,” Faucheaux added.

It’s almost certain that the next year will prove to be yet another milestone for Wilderness Pangs. With all of its members back in one (almost) central location and a drive to complete a new album, this band that was never supposed to be is certainly looking forward to the next step, which in the immediate future includes their next show at The Spanish Moon with the New York-based band The Shivers.

“The Shivers kick ass and this is going to be an amazing show,” Faucheaux, who is a fan of The Shivers, emphatically said. “I’m more excited to see them than getting to play, but it’s really awesome that I get to play with them because they actually asked us to play the show. That touched my heart really deeply.”

Perhaps the show will touch your heart, too.

For more information about Wilderness Pangs, visit their MySpace page at www.myspace.com/wildernesspangs.

Originally Published: Issue 758 - March 18, 2009 - Tiger Weekly

http://audiversity.com/2007/03/new-music-gowns-zu-nobukazu-takemura.html

Wilderness Pangs - The Indivisible Squalor of Wilderness Pangs / Apocalypse the Apocalypse

But the worst kind of madness, I'd imagine, is the one you'd have living in hell for all eternity. Now I'm not a bettin' man, but I generally like to err on the side of caution when moral dealings are in play. Baton Rouge, Louisiana-bred Wilderness Pangs, on the other hand, have no such qualms. In fact, they've already sold their souls to Woland in exchange for having their tunes as the soundtrack to a real musician's hell. Frankly, Dream Theater could learn a thing or two from these guys: The Indivisible Squalor of Wilderness Pangs is, much like Zu & Takemura, a total mess of sounds coagulating together to form some glorious, noisy, disheveled kind of album only God himself could love unconditionally.

I take that back. Color me a sinner, but I'm possessed by this album at the moment. Right from the outset of the unassuming "Magic Bullet," you're thrown into the middle of the woods as howling wolves and alien spacecraft surround you. The bayou doesn't get any friendlier after you've been abducted into "The Elephant Ghost Saga Parts 1 & 2," easily one of the noisiest and most overmodulated pieces of music I've heard this year and all the better for its lo-fi effect. If you've ever wondered what living in a Kuznetsov turbofan sounds like without any earplugs, you've got two options: My Bloody Valentine's "Only Shallow" (which is far more akin to a Rolls Royce than a Kuznetsov, pretty and delicate in its power rather than smoking and careless of stealth) or the second song on this 14-tracker. It gets friendlier (if no less strange) in the third part, a separate song altogether. The vocals here really make a difference, and help to anchor what would otherwise be beautiful but somewhat remote. Randy Faucheux (which I sincerely hope is his actual name) can sing along with an erratic horn and make it sound like there's an anchor to it all. Indeed, a few times on here you've actually got a straightforward folk song to balance out the acid-rock hysteria ("I Shot My Favorite Horse" is the first example, but "Wolfman" is also genuinely pretty in its slow-roasted folk pastiche).

In the case of Wilderness Pangs, the manuscripts can't burn because there simply weren't any to begin with; repeating some of these performances must be difficult if not impossible, but once again it's the delivered energy that makes all the difference. Doesn't matter if they don't repeat every shaken coin jar or include every processed beat every single time; the fact that they produced it at all in the first place is a testament both to their seemingly endless supply of ideas and the creative blaze that's currently engulfing Wilderness Pangs. To think this is but their first album... Well, that is something special. Bulgakov would be proud. - Audiversity

By Vincent Cellucci

Wilderness Pangs offers a slew of sounds—indeed, the resonating forest party their name implies. Think back to The Hobbit where Biblo strayed from the path in the forest to follow some party’s light. Instead of offering light, Wilderness Pangs leads its listeners through their shifting, wooded mirth with sound.

Finding this party may be a challenge. Some listeners might be incapable of enjoying the party when they get there. Wilderness Pangs relies on distortions and feedback to create their sound—a sound that jumps from one spot of the music forest to the next.



I was excited to hear references to Skinny Puppy and industrial material like NIN’s Broken at the beginning of Wilderness Pangs. I don’t think industrial music received enough attention as a sub genre by America and with “the elephant ghost saga part 1 & 2” Wilderness Pangs revives some for us.



Wilderness Pangs then alternates from chill folk tunes to barrages of sound much like Beck’s Stereophonic Soul Manure without the overt jokes. Although, their material does have a quirky, subtle sense of humor that’s working—like the great parenthetical title to “suitcase thief”, “(clock ass cloak).”



So you want a canopy tour through this wilderness?



“i shot my favorite horse” is a cool song that moves the party over to the country western side of the spectrum—just follow the subject matter and steel guitar. It’s well placed and serves as a grove where the listener can regroup.



“roundabout way” thrives on its resilient pounding drums and punk vocals over a quick electric guitar strumming. The lead guitar piece approximately two minutes into the song cannot be missed. It certainly saves a bit overzealous breakdown/ deconstructing noise— comparable to a miniature version the breakdowns off Nirvana’s In Utero.



“wolfman” begins with an intriguing sample linking the character to “the last of the great soul man, resident in this body right here.” It is by far my favorite song on the album. The lyrics are a little problematic because they alternate from an omniscient perspective of the wolfman including his “visions of goats” to an imperative ode to the wolfman. My favorite lyrics of the album are a potent plea to the character; “wolf man quit your howling because the moon is out of reach.” There is some synthetic material added to round out the track at the end, but I’m not sure if every song needs to attempt a “Revolution 9” level of integrated sound. “wolfman” ends with a humorous rendition of the chorus of “My Girl.”



“stolen logic” is a nice appropriation of hip hop—once again I think of Beck and would label this song pop hop. Once again and appropriate to the song, the electric guitar on this track is dope. This song morphs into several sections that aesthetically obscure the strict connection, which accentuates the return arrival at their forest party. This must be a mission of Wilderness Pangs.



“ms. smith” is a spaced out jam with some really ethereal vocal work. I think I can respectfully say it is their version of an ideal smoking song, very much like “Planet Caravan.” It ends with radiating electricity and it is very clear this band cares about their conduction—searching and sounding out the rock n’ roll wilderness, and returning as hosts.



I anticipate seeing a live performance by Wilderness Pangs to hear how they translate their self-titled album live. Anyone desiring to contact Wilderness Pangs, for CDs, for shows, or anything else, can reach them by email ( randyf3@gmail.com ). Wilderness Pangs are Jeremy Baptiste, Randy Faucheux, John Vitrano, and Brandon White. - Baton Rouge Lagniappe

http://225batonrouge.com/blogs/cookies-record-crate/2007/feb/19/recordcrate21907/

By Alex V. Cook

"...
Saturday night, after the delirious chaos of the Spanish Town parade and subsequent house parties where I saw both Elsah and Local 309 turn out great ramshackle sets that mixed ideally with the weather and one more beer, I hit the Spanish Moon for the CD release party of Wilderness Pangs, and for a break from form. The opening bands, Lafayette’s The Brass Bed and Omaha’s Little Brazil both turned in resplendent sets of bar rock, especially The Brass Bed, opening up their roots rock to a little psychedelia. But once the multiple guitars, laptops and saxophone and drums of experimental outfit Wilderness Pangs were set into motion, it became immediately apparent that they were trying to reach escape velocity. It started out with a deep, static drone punctuated by interruptions from the guitars and the singer. Much like on their album, they varied from sonic onslaught to pastoral campfire weirdness, but each song found the band pushing out of the envelope of your regular rock music. Experimental music is a risky affair by nature. In their short set, they definitely created an atmosphere where one felt anything could happen and while sometimes it appeared to descend into disorder, they reached points where they were making something very interesting happen. A lot of bands are very happy plucking the low-hanging fruit, but not too many of them are willing to go out on a limb like Wilderness Pangs was. They are still a young band, one well worth keeping your eye on as they further harness the forces at their disposal.
..." - 225batonrouge.com

By Alex V. Cook

Wednesday, February 28, 2007

“We’ve had several people tell us ‘I don’t usually like this kind of stuff, but I really enjoyed watching you guys play.’ Which puzzles me, cuz I’m not sure what ‘kind of stuff’ we are,” explains Randy Faucheux III, guitarist/vocalist/percussionist for experimental rock outfit Wilderness Pangs.

Faucheux is the music director for campus radio station KLSU, so when you ask who the band’s influences are, you get an encyclopedic response. “I’d say stuff like the Beach Boys, Prince, OutKast, Merzbow, Captain Beefheart, Pussy Galore. Honestly, I could go on and on. We’re all such huge music fans, and really, we’re open to letting just about anything influence what we do, so long as it works within the context of what we’re doing.”

Multi-instrumentalist Jeremy Baptiste’s response is a little more direct.

“For me, it all started with Prince. He always yelled and made really odd songs and found a way to make it rock and freak at the same time,” Baptiste says.

Whatever ingredients go into the group, the outcome is always surprising. One minute they’re working an electro grove on some dodgy keyboards, the next moment they’re raging away over some caveman guitar riff. “I kind of like it to feel like we’re always about to fall apart,” says Faucheux. “And if we’re successful, we never actually will fall apart.”

But it doesn’t fly for everyone. One local musician sought the band out on its MySpace page to describe Wilderness Pangs as “what real musicians are forced to listen to in hell.” But the band is comfortable with not fitting in too well. “We actually all appreciated that one way more than we were offended by it,” says Faucheux. “That’s so much cooler than just being the kind of band that bores people to the point of apathy.”

The band has been laboring away on its first full-length release, recorded at local mainstay studio Apocalypse the Apocalypse. They pooled their myriad of styles to create a greater vision. “Elephant Ghost” is a hazy, homey number where sunburned guitars give way to handclaps and nightmare flashbacks. “Stolen Logic” mines an almost underground hip-hop terrain, with the vocals spoken over a minimalist synthesizer beat. “Roundabout Way” is an infectious fuzz-guitar and racket punky number that reminds one of the more pop moments on early Sonic Youth albums.

“I think we’re more pop than we are rock,” says Faucheux. “For me, the difference between rock and pop is the focus on rhythm or melody. Rock is rhythm; pop is melody. And melody is definitely extremely important in what we do.”

The country-ish, acoustic-guitar based “Shot My Favorite Horse” would not be out of place on a mid-career Stones or Neil Young album, with a lonely slide guitar snaking around the melody. “Wolfman” pits a plaintive psychedelic ballad against a percolating wall of noises. All these different sides to the band culminate on the 8-minute “Ms. Smith” where electronic drones form like clouds over a plaintive, almost somnambulistic pop daydream. The album is multifaceted and touches on a lot of different styles without compromising the underlying restless exploratory thread of the band. - 225 Magazine

http://67.227.135.129/article/2008/06/19/meeting-band-6

...
What is the worst album ever written?

Oliver: Wilderness Pangs. We played their CD release show in Baton Rouge. They were so bad. I think they were drunk and tripping. It was terrible; we threw their album out the van on the highway.
... - Omaha City Weekly

http://www.225batonrouge.com/news/2007/dec/28/top-5-baton-rouge-records-2007/

"Wilderness Pangs – The Indivisible Squalor of Wilderness Pangs (Apocalypse the Apocalypse)

The reactions to Wilderness Pangs are divisible. One person described them as “music real musicians have to listen to in hell,” but they definitely leave their mark. Their pop take on noise got the attention of CMJ, who made them a Spotlight Artist on their Web site and then invited them to play at the CMJ Marathon in New York. Their songs mix drones, noises and folk in singular cohesion, exploring both the softer side of weird and the weirder side of soft." - 225 Magazine