Craving and Aversion

Many years ago someone handed me a copy of Wilderness’s self-titled album and I loved it: chanty vocals, post-punk instrumentation, a record I’ve returned to ever since. For reasons I can’t account for, I never looked into who the band were or what happened to them (they disbanded, it turns out, at the end of the aughts).

So it was a nice surprise when a friend sent me this four-track EP and it sounded immediately familiar in the right way. Vulture Feather is a Northern California trio featuring two former Wilderness members, and Craving and Aversion trades that band’s chanty restraint for something more muscular and hypnotic—post-hardcore-indebted art rock, to borrow their own framing. Colin McCann’s vocals still do that preacherly thing. The rhythms circle rather than resolve. A prompt to finally do my homework.