CONCERT: WAND

In late 2013ish Los Angeles California, Wand formed up and got right on it, playing, writing & plotting a path forward – a not-undifficult task for a special new band come to life in the twenty-teens and audaciously self-identifying as “Wand”. The original group – Cory Hanson (guitar, vocals), Lee Landey (bass), Evan Burrows (drums) and Daniel Martens (guitar) – recorded Ganglion Reef before too long and attracted the attentions of GOD? Records, In the Red and Drag City all at once. A deal was dreamed up and hammered down: first album with GOD?, second with In the Red, and then Drag City. What would the result of THAT be?

So began the years of furious activity; near-constant days of touring and recording and releasing. Between August 2014 and September 2017, Wand released Ganglion Reef, Golem, 1000 Days and Plum, a period in which they also reduced from quartet to trio (less Daniel) and then expanded to quintet (with the addition of Robbie Cody (guitar) and Sofia Arreguin (keys, vocals, percussion)). All this action had launched them onto the world-wide stage, which suggested increasingly more to do all the time. No prob: everyone was playing in other bands, and Cory started a solo career too. No time like the present! A maxi-EP, “Perfume”, appeared in the Spring of 2018 and the double-album Laughing Matter dropped in April 2019. Touring continued apace; it was only the CoCo craze of the following year that that forced any downtime – and even that gap was filled with the mixing of an epic live document, the 2xLP Spiders In the Rain, dropped in the pan in 2022. All this while Evan focused on his long-time other band, Behavior, plus Pink Trash Can, and Robby joined in on both endeavors, while Sofia played with Shannon Lay and Kamikaze Palm Tree, and Cory wrote and recorded two more solo albums!

When the smoke cleared on all the pandammit action, Lee and Sofia had decided it was time to get on beyond Wand, something the other three were still dedicated to doing while remaining in the band. Ayund… clock on the wall said it was time for another album, as it was suddenly a few years since Laughing Matter. That’s when Vertigo set in. Robbie began to record the new stuff at his place. The new Wand directive: recording only, no writing. That would come later. Surely the next great Wand album was somewhere at this end of this rainbow? Yep – by late 2023, all of it had boiled down to album-size, and Vertigo was soon slated for release on July 26, 2024. In the process, Wand had grown an extra hand – or more accurately, become a quartet again, with the addition of Evan Backer (known as Evan Too, for those keeping track). And what ho, more dates had been scheduled and played, and more scheduled. For the earth is round and we must continue in orbit. For Wand, this means North America in the summer and Europe in the fall, with Mars TBA. What next, man?