The Wild Waiting

It’s rare to find commercially minded fare with such openhearted sincerity. The Wild Waiting might welcome the fortune and blandishments mainstream success brings, but their pop-drenched outings never sound studied or calculated. The six songs on their debut EP Stay Gold are impressively polished offerings, aimed for broad-based appeal, and never chintzy. Instead, they condense cinematic arrangements into the sub-four minute songs filled to the point of bursting with musings one expects from singer/songwriters, not pop tunesmiths. They move like mini-symphonies or chamber pieces using far from baroque instrumentation. Guitars, keyboards, drums, bass, voice, and tastefully employed effects are the only colors The Wild Waiting need to fill in their first canvas. It’s a testament to their talents that even in the nation’s toughest live music market, the East Coast, these young musicians stand out so well.

Beginning the EP with “All My Life”, the band’s first single, is putting their best foot forward. The song has a deeper groove than anything else on Stay Gold thanks to superb drumming bringing a strongly dramatic air to its changes. “Burn with Me” follows the opener’s example in many ways. It might lack the distinctive movement heard in the opening track, but the vocal harmonies are stronger and the lyrics have a darker hue dovetailing nicely into the musical mood. The Wild Waiting pulls back some on the vocal pyrotechnics for “Say The Right Words”, but the song’s comparatively stripped-back approach doesn’t translate to a drop off in quality. The band’s guitar work, consigned to a supporting role through much of the first two tracks, starts to assert itself on this song and it makes for a nice contrast with the EP’s opening songs. 

The Wild Waiting explore darker shades on “2AM Fearless”, a far grittier blast of rock than any other track. The atmosphere captures the late night carousing depicted in the lyrics and has a credible attack, but the song’s peak comes with its impressively powerful choruses. “Someone To Go With” might sound clumsily sentimental in the hands of duller musicians, but The Wild Waiting do a superb job portraying the life-affirming energies of youthful possibility without ever relying too heavily on cliché. Their avoidance of cliché, however, is never as pronounced as it is on the album’s final track, “Stay Gold”. It has a surprisingly quasi-orchestral build crossed with the band’s basic pop rock attack, but they explore softer textures as well. It’s certainly the album’s most ambitious moment and ends the release on a deeply satisfying note.

This is a debut EP glowing with the band’s impressive potential. The Wild Waiting have realized their possibilities much earlier than similar bands and that fact alone suggests that this is an unit capable of making many fine albums and surprising us often. Stay Gold has the unmistakable feel of an opening salvo – this is a band that’s just getting started. Get in on the ground floor of goodness today. 

8 out of 10 stars.  

Lydia Hillenburg