Entering the Decagon: Way Out West at #8

Sorry, presumed readers - bar exam consumed much time of late, but I'm ready to get writing again.

Way Out West is a bit enigmatic of a band. This is in large part because they ply their trade primarily in trance and its environs. When people know how to do trance, it is very, very good, among the best music around. But finding that quality trance is very difficult and can make you give up on the genre if you don't find it. When Way Out West is on their game, they make incredible stuff; otherwise, it's just sort of there. As a result, I don't listen to them much aside from their top songs, so in terms of career/band analysis, this one's a bit more down on the group than I'd like for it to be. They've been ahead of the electronica curve several times, and there's no reason to think it won't keep happening; it's just that the results are less than stellar when they're not on their A-game.

WOW is a Bristol, UK duo comprising Nick Warren and Jody Wisternoff. Both are well-known in the electronica scene, the former for all sorts of things (the first mix CD of the Back to Mine series and other similar works) and the latter for a recent string of dancefloor hits with retro vibes ("Cold Drink, Hot Girl" and "Starstrings" being the main ones). Their busy schedules elsewhere have held them to only three albums in 13 years, but there's a fourth coming soon.

Their relevant works are:
Way Out West (1997) - With songs like "The Gift" and "Domination," the debut album established what makes WOW so great; melodic trance productions with rhythms rarely matched in the genre. This is one of those classic "next level" albums; if you like trance and have gotten all the seminal works, this one gives your collection the extra bit of depth and variety needed to make it a vital collection.
Intensify (2001) - Moving more towards a more streamlined trance but leaving room for some vocal numbers, I rate this one higher than many (Allmusic gives it only 3 stars and I have no clue why). In terms of completeness as an album, this is one of the best trance albums out there. Some moves are obvious (like building opener "The Fall" around Mixmaster Morris's version of "Autumn Leaves"), but there's still plenty of material to separate them from the pack.
Don't Look Now (2005) - As some of you may know, the early-to-mid-'00s were not kind to electronica in general. BT's noted (I believe in a live Twitter-fueled interview this summer) that he felt completely uninspired by what was going on in the scene for a number of years. He hadn't done any dance stuff since his album in 2003, choosing instead to make the dramatic electroniscore This Binary Universe in the interim, and it's only this year that he's returned to dance. The gap really was that big, and this album is one of the albums from an innovative artist that failed to innovate.

The problem plagued the genre at large as mainstream audiences were embracing electronica; increasing vocal turns and a move toward pop may have gotten songs on Dawson's Creek or some similar show, but it weakened the music. This is especially so with WOW, who slowed down their songs to pop tempo for their vocalist, leaving no space for the rhythmic detail that is usually their over-the-top strength. When they left the pop alone, such as on "Anything But You," the results with vocals were brilliant. To be fair, there was a lot of average-to-above-average material on the album, but the clunkers drag them down significantly, as the album generates no momentum. Of all artists who could make the transition to vocal electronic pop for an album, this isn't one of them, sad to say.

Spaceman single (2008) - Vocals are out, rhythm's back in, song is a return to form. The band says their next album is a bunch of "cosmic disco" stuff, which from what I've heard loses the beat again. But appreciate this gem of a song for all its awesomeness.

Nine-point analysis:

1) Chord sequences. For the most part, WOW avoids the most cliched of its genre, and it doesn't have one song that makes you think of another automatically on that front. From a trance group, this is about all you can hope for. Fair enough.

2) Song structure. They shine here, especially relative to trance. What WOW does that I haven't heard from any other trance artist is what I like to call the "late break"; i.e. they'll take a mood that's been going for the whole song and bring in new instruments and usually a new chord sequence. On "Domination," which Warren considers the quintessential Way Out West song, you get new chords for the first time around the 6-minute mark, when most songs would consider it too late to introduce something new like that. "Hypnotise," another personal favorite, has a fairly standard trance motif until the middle, where it breaks down and comes back with this 2-step type rhythm that reintroduces the vocal sample saying "Hypnotise" but with more of the sample, as in you get more lyrics suddenly. For a genre like trance that tends to get repetitive quickly, that they're able to introduce these twists so late in the game, in a way saving the best for last, makes them singular. They don't have to be big twists, but they're always effective due to genre. Points here.

3) Mood. They don't really ply their trade here. Though songs like "The Gift" have a solid mood to them, usually they're just trying to get people to dance. Their short ambient pieces that show up every now and again aren't that effective, either.

4) Layers. These primarily serve song structure and rhythm and don't have independent value in this case. Their songs always sound sufficiently fleshed out, which, like most things, isn't standard for trance. (There's some cheap trance out there, people. Stay away from it. It's poison.)

5) Genre-bending. They've only really been in this area twice, once with "The Gift" and arguably a second time with "Hypnotise." On the latter, it's what I already mentioned, that a trance song went straight into a 2-step shuffle without blinking. Given that the producers of each came from very different assumptions on how to go about making a song, that WOW put them together as though this happened all the time is a special thing indeed.

But it's "The Gift" that really shines on this front. Nick Warren admits that the idea was just to slow down a drum'n'bass/jungle vibe, but that allows for completely different instrumentation and mood. "The Gift" isn't trance and it isn't jungle; it's jungle at trance speed with ambient soundscape, and the song feels like it knows it's unique. If you're a genre omnivore (genrevore?) like me, you're incomplete without giving this song a spin. WOW as a group doesn't always care about fusing things, but they're absolutely brilliant when they do.

6) Innovation. For "The Gift" and for ratcheting up the rhythmic complexity of trance in an era when that wasn't really the thing to do, they get some points here, but it's not its own category for the group. Certainly it's not a weakness, though.

7) Rhythm. The other major point-grabber here, as their best work is full of rhythmic elements all over the place, and not just on the drums either. They're also adept at hitting the off-sixteenth note in a natural-sounding way. One of the early elements of "Domination" has them introducing an Ab sound at the 9, 10, 12, 14, and 16 of the 16 notes in the bar, which is extremely difficult to pull off when your hi-hats are at 3 and 10 and your snare's at 5 and 13. It's pulling in a different direction, but they work it all in. "Activity" puts a closed hi-hat at the off-sixteenths as well while making it sound house, which it clearly isn't. Normally, when I hear someone use off-beat syncopation that way, I think Gloria Estefan or someone similar, which isn't helpful. It is next to impossible to syncopate house or trance in a non-annoying, cohesive way, but WOW's ace at this. Their sense of rhythm is nearly unmatched by their peers, and it's their calling card for sure. This is why I can't get into Don't Look Now; they traded in a lot of that complexity to put vocals in, and they like Samson seemed shorn to weakness.

8) Production. They glue their elements well and always sound full, but that doesn't make it an over-the-top point like it was for the Doves. It's good production, but it's not surprising production. Solid, but not a strength or anything.

9) Album construction. Way Out West and Intensify both had solid construction, particularly the latter. Don't Look Now had awful sequencing, but this was mainly from the confused nature of the songs themselves. They could have taken the instrumentals + a couple vocal songs, added a few others, and made it sound like a successor to Intensify if they had wanted to. Overall, I'll call this a strength, at least when they have the songs to support it.

Overall strengths: 2,5,7,8,9. So with only five strengths, how did they get above two bands with six? Basically, WOW is so good when they play to their strengths that they outshine almost everyone when they're on. Very few artists can fill the rhythmic element as well as they can, particularly in trance; even BT, who's a rhythm master, rarely pushes the beat in his trance, preferring to make breakbeat/nu-skool numbers for that urge instead. WOW makes the best rhythms in trance, period. I hope they continue to care about that, but for now they've left a great legacy in what trance can be at its top end.