Secular Music by Wilding

Los Angeles trio Wilding release their debut EP Secular Music via Friendship Fever on 28 April. Fronted by visionary songwriter Dave Woody, formerly of 90s indie fuzz-rockers Fiver, he is joined by Andrew Platts on drums and bass player Bowman. Wilding’s is at once harmonic, melodic and even dark at times dominated by scuzzy, chiming guitars and a heavy back beat, with Dave’s voice soaring above the cacophony in a register all its own.
 
Wilding shared the video for the track "Ghost Deer" with Stereogum, who said; "The clip splices scenes of Dave Woody and his bandmates performing with images of astronaut training and space shuttle launching with pillars of smoke left in its wake. The dimly lit video often fades to darkness, leaving nothing but the bright flames of takeoff against the band’s wall of noisy guitar distortion."

Originally from Modesto, California, Dave Woody emerged from the same scene that launched Grandaddy. As frontman of Fiver, he garnered a long list of accolades over the span of three LPs, the first of which was produced by Jason Lytle. With Fiver he toured with Death Cab for Cutie, played alongside the Silversun Pickups and opened for Frank Black in London.

Wilding has roots meandering back to the early 2000s whilst Woody was working on other projects. Standing apart from the homegrown California scene-shifters, the songs he was working on embodied a kind of symphonic noisy bliss that made perfect sense. As he explains; "Wilding has always felt like a different kind of energy to me. There is a darkness there, but it gets delivered in this burst of light and energy. We're pretty much guaranteed to wind up disappointed, but we can never give up that search for something better inside ourselves. Destroy complacency. These songs shine a light on the dark."

The five beautifully crafted fuzz-pop songs on the Secular Music EP have dizzyingly varied themes. “Ghost Deer” is an ode to the unknown genius plodding away in the shadows, whereas “Skin Shells” is a slacker-take on Plato’s cave allegory in a two-minute pop song. “Haunted Mouth” is inspired by a tape-recording found by the FBI at the infamous site of the People’s Temple/Jim Jones tragedy and “VCR” was inspired by a My Bloody Valentine song.

Dave - guitar / vox
Andrew - drums
Bowman - bass

wildingmusic.com