wand’s cory hanson on this heat, martin rev, and never doing the same thing twice

“Record Exchange” is a series of conversations between see/saw and a fellow punk enthusiast. Each person brings two songs to discuss. The latest installment is a chat with Cory Hanson of the band Wand, whose new album Vertigo arrived on Friday courtesy of Drag City.

When a new Wand album comes along, it’s never clear what the listener is in for. Even the band isn’t sure what’s going to happen when they get together to make a new record. “I just can't do the same thing twice,” says Cory Hanson. “I can't do it. I really wish I could sometimes. Even filling out a W9 or fucking doing my taxes or writing my name, I can't do it the same way twice. I think this has been a problem since I was a kid. It’s called the ADD.”

Vertigo is the latest example—an expansive improvisational work that’s too clear-eyed to be called psychedelic, but sounds like an odyssey. Hanson says Wand have been searching for this kind of clarity in their sound since 2017’s Plum. “It feels pretty damn close to representing exactly what we were trying to do sonically as a band,” he said. “It’s an interesting record because it does something that none of our other records do. There’s two sides to it and they’re happening simultaneously. There are these very considered, arranged, carefully constructed songs, but the material they’re constructed out of is just hours and hours of improvisations.”

Touring behind the album, Wand opened a couple shows for the Red Hot Chili Peppers. As an L.A. band, this was a coronation of sorts. “It’s really hard not to rep the Chili Peps growing up here. They get a bad rap, some people think that their music is intolerably obnoxious and I get it, I get why you would think that. But when I was 14, watching VH1, smoking weed with my best friend in his mom’s apartment while she was at work and every other music video was a Red Hot Chili Peppers music video while cannabis clouds went into my bloodstream? Yeah, that’s it, it’s over.”

“I will say this to anyone that really does not fuck with the Chili Peps: You just gotta watch Funky Monks and just try not to like them after you watch that.” He said the whole family would be coming out to see them open for Kiedis and Flea. 

Cory’s pick: This Heat’s “Makeshift Swahili” (Peel Sessions)

It’s my favorite Peel Session. They had to do the best Peel Session, of course. This fucking band. They couldn’t just have a mediocre one, like “this is the way we play it live.” It’s like no, we’ll do tons of overdubs, make a mini record. It really gets your blood pressure up listening to shit like that. They’re a huge band for me—a very important band for the way that I think about being in a band with other people and the way that I think about approaching making records.

They just do this interesting thing that not a lot of bands do where they treat the record itself as this time manipulation device. They're like, oh, we can speed them up, we can slow them down, we can cut them up, we can take other recordings, we’re making tape loops, we can splice in a part of a live performance. That's the original cut of this song as half of it is taken from a live performance of the song. So they're doing all that and creating sediments of recorded meaning and performance within the music. I think that was really important to the way that we approach music. I don't think that we could have made the record that we made, Vertigo, if we hadn't all spent quite a bit of time with Deceit that blue and yellow record and Health and Efficiency.

see/saw’s pick: The Drin’s “Tigers Cage”

It’s a long tail on that sax, man. Yeah, I don't know. It was OK. I'm not blown away by it. Like lyrically, it sounded more in the world of black metal or something. I'm sensing some metal vibes thematically, but not musically. 

I don’t know, I just gravitate towards and really obsess about records like [This Heat’s Peel Sessions], that's more where I'm at. I mean, I've listened to tons of punk music and grew up in the L.A. punk scene. That was where I came up, trying to keep up or like listening to new punk bands. I'd go to shows all the time and see bands. Now I'm not like a genre person. I'm not like, “Oh, I just need to get my fix.” There's lots of people like that and there's nothing wrong with that, but I'm more like, OK, like, you know, “This is fine, this is fine, this is fine…what the fuck is this? This thing's amazing.” And you know, I’ll obsess about it and get way too into it, and then it'll change my life and then I'll keep making records.

Cory’s pick: Nervous Gender’s “People Like You”

They’re an L.A. band. They had a bunch of very short-lived iterations, but I think this record has Don Bolles on drums. There’s I think one member of the Screamers in the band, so it’s kind of a freaky synth proto-electropunk, even proto-industrial weird band that exists in a weird class of their own. They had very performative, almost happening-style shows. After Don Bolles left, their drummer was an 8-year-old child. There’s a lot of good footage of that. I thought it’d be cool to throw in a weird jewel of L.A. punk history that’s often not really talked about. 

see/saw’s pick: Suicide’s “Love So Lovely”

I love Suicide. They're a very unique band; they really stick out in that world of New York punk and no wave and stuff. It almost feels like they were just happening on a parallel line to all that stuff because they're just out of fucking nowhere. It’s like they're from outer space or something.

I saw Martin Rev, like, a few months ago. He was fantastic. Alan Vega's vocal style, his performance, it's hard for me to think of anyone else like that. There's a lot of imitators, but nobody does it like that. It's, like, spooky, weird, witchy music to me.

They do this thing that I like a lot on the production side, or on the Martin Rev side. Like this ’80s production thing, it feels kind of weaponized. It's, like, dangerous. He’s taking all these hi-fi production techniques and just being like, no, this is evil stuff now. I'm gonna do bad things with this. It's the same with early Suicide where he's got a farfisa and a little rhythm box and he’s like, oh I can’t imagine what kind of horrible things I can do with this thing.

see/saw is a reader-supported publication. If you enjoyed this article, please consider a paid subscription to support this independent punk journalism operation.