It’s pretty much impossible to ignore the childish elements of You Can Be A Wesley. From the band name, to singer Saara Untracht-Oakner’s girlish vocals, to videos centering on pink puppet monsters, there’s youthfulness radiating from every note. It’s these charming elements that allow you to overlook the fact that You Can Be A Wesley’s music is so indebted to early-90s alt-rock and appreciate it for its catchiness and easy digestibility. And, beneath all this sheen and pep in their music, tangled between the interplaying guitars, you’ll find upon multiple listens to their debut EP Nightosphere, that there’s an aching heart at the centre of it all.
Opener “Hold On” is a barrage of squealing guitars and pounding a pounding rhythm section, something which stays constant throughout Nightosphere’s six tracks. The instruments are harnessed admirably, to the point where at any instance in the whole EP the song could explode for a few bars only to be reined in perfectly and quickly a short while later. This gives You Can Be A Wesley a sort of secret weapon, something that suggests they are more than the sum of their parts. This is best shown in “Bones,” the release’s longest track which moves through several levels of volume, from the meandering opening, the crunchy bridge and chorus and the final, floating outro. The way the rhythm section holds it all together allows the guitars and vocals to become expressive and change the mood effectively from one moment to the next. On the other side of the coin there are plenty of simple verse-chorus-verse songs which are also potent in their enjoyability.
As mentioned earlier, further listens reveal the depth to Nightosphere, and the when you start to listen to it more, it’s like a gradual loss of innocence. “Talking Science” sounds like a simple enough song without much of a message, but delving into the lyrics shows that it’s a song that seems to encompass all of life’s stresses and a desire to give up (“Fold your mind and slip into creases when you find…”), before it all gets shrugged off in a bouncy “doot doot doot” hook. Then there are the songs of love. From the heartbreaking opener “Hold On,” to “Prisoners” which places Untracht-Oakner in a dangerously dysfunctional relationship, to the closing “Old In Florida,” which seems to be as satisfied with love as we get here.
You Can Be A Wesley are a surprise package. Ostensibly they are a simple band with one or more hooks per song, easy to enjoy and not much more. But, when you start to unravel the songs presented here you can see the detail in each. Just taking the hooks at face value doesn’t do justice to how tightly constructed these songs are, or how much of a message there is within each song. There’s a surprising amount that can be taken away from this 22-minute collection, and while I think that it is probably impossible to take away everything, but I know it is impossible for someone to listen to this and take away nothing.
