Album Review: Weedpecker, IV: The Stream of Forgotten Thoughts
One has to imagine that at some point in the last two-plus years, founding guitarist/vocalist Piotr Wyroslaw “Wyro” Dobry had to decide whether the music he and his band were putting together was still Weedpecker. Obviously, the answer was yes, but listening to the band’s fourth album, IV: The Stream of Forgotten Thoughts, issued by the venerable Stickman Records, the question feels legitimate. After all, Dobry in the three years since III (featured here) has overseen a complete revamping of the group’s lineup, including the shifting of his brother/fellow founding member Bartek Dobry to more of a producer’s role, contributing to arrangements and even a few riffs here and there but not necessarily participating in the day-to-day writing or shows.
As the lone remaining original member, Piotr Dobry has recast Weedpecker as nothing less than a supergroup of Polish heavy, bringing in Piotr “Seru” Sadza, also known as “Cheesy Dude” in Belzebong, as the band’s first full-time keyboardist, as well as Major Kong‘s Dominik “Domel” Stachyra on bass and Tankograd drummer Tomasz Walczak (also ex-Dopelord) to complete the band.
And in many ways, Weedpecker are the same band, and IV: The Stream of Forgotten Thoughts is an outgrowth of the more rock progresywny direction undertaken on the last album. But there’s no denying the sonic shifts happening across its eight-song/39-minute span either, and given that they open with the careening, twisting and winding movements of “No Heartbeat Collective” — also the longest track (immediate points) at 6:11 — denial is about as far from the intention as they could get. Embrace, more like, and fair enough.
Like any good stream, it flows. And like any good dream, IV: The Stream of Forgotten Thoughts begins and ends with clarity, the initial chug of “No Heartbeat Collective” establishing the ground from which to launch before its suitably motorik takeoff, and closer “Symbiotic Nova” seeming to answer with its own final measures of driving riffs. There are similar moments peppered throughout, and the Elder influence that has been a part of them since their outset remains intact despite never having before been so richly surrounded or individually interpreted, but Weedpecker are less of a ‘riff band’ than they’ve ever been in these songs, the focus instead on shimmering melodies and complexity of composition.
For having cut back to one guitar, I’m not sure if they’ve ever had so much happening in their material as even the three-minute interlude “The Trip Treatment” works in layers of wash and turns, let alone songs like “Fire Far Away” and “The Stream of Forgotten Thoughts,” which balance between serenity of atmosphere and cascading layers of motion. The word is “busy,” but Weedpecker don’t seem to be without purpose in having so much going on in the material, and it’s more than just throwing everything into everything so that the quiet stretch at the outset of “The Stream of Forgotten Thoughts” and the harder-hitting outset of “Big Brain Monsters” can stand out.
Across the span, to varying degrees, Dobry‘s vocals are buried beneath the instruments and subject to an effects treatment, and while like many of the elements put to use across IV: The Stream of Forgotten Thoughts, this is something Weedpecker have done before, it’s never been done in quite this way and to quite this degree. The band, then, have pushed further beyond the early accomplishments of their 2013 self-titled debut (review here) and the course set by II (review here) in 2015, toward a less-charted heavy space rock aesthetic that is resonant in melody and atmosphere and able to both overwhelm and soothe at will.
This, honestly, would probably be enough of an accomplishment to call the record a victory for Dobry and the band he’s remade, but it still doesn’t account for the boogie that emerges in “Big Brain Monsters” or the float-into-submersion that unfolds in “Endless Extensions of Good Vibrations,” its five minutes shifting from stillness to gallop skillfully punctuated by Walczak‘s drums as the guitar soars and shreds in kind ahead of the key-led drift of the first half of the penultimate “Unusual Perceptions,” which follows and soon finds its own, almost jazzy, pushes and pulls in a fitting summary of the various sides of Weedpecker on aural display throughout the record.
The quiet and loud, the fast and the slow, sure, but that’s a simplification. Superficial. It’s more about the elements at play — very much playing — at any given moment and the ambience they create either by working in accord or crashing one into the other in Large Hadron fashion. Willful contrast and cohesion. Science! Theories tested, observations recorded, preserved for posterity and to be used as a basis for future discovery and, hopefully, progress of thought.
“Symbiotic Nova” feels suitably like a conclusion — a point of arrival for the journey the four-piece have undertaken together. Vocals still occur from a distance, and the intensity of the beginning moment gives way to a moment of more subdued fluidity before the final stretch begins; a last intake of air before the last exhalation to come. At 3:35 into the total 5:02, a march is established and offset by a sweeping figure on guitar that itself moves into a lead line, and the ending is duly announced. The whole of Weedpecker ride that groove to an ending no less atmospheric than anything that’s come before it but still able to cast itself as, as previously noted, something utterly clearheaded and meant to be.
Invariably, the same is true of IV: The Stream of Forgotten Thoughts as a whole, and while the abiding brew they craft is heady to be sure, there’s no less heart at work in their exploration. This is only consistent with Weedpecker as they’ve always been, and while they’ve undertaken a mission different from that with which they set out nearly a decade ago, their readiness to embrace new ideas and methods assures that their work will not be so easily forgotten, even as their travels into the sonic unknown of their own making continue.
