Peter Wolf Crier: Inter-Be

Peter Wolf Crier — the Midwestern duo made up of Peter Pisano and Brian Moen — are really on to something with the title of their first record. That made up phrase, Inter-Be, goes a long way in describing what’s going on in this record. It covers not only the sonic landscape here, which echoes both back into the past and forward into tomorrow, but also the emotion of the record and, perhaps most interestingly, where their sound falls in today’s musical world.

The duo’s sound could — repeat, could, were it made of lesser parts — get lumped in with a bunch of indie heavyweights, relegated to being the guys that sound like someone we already know. To hear the way Pisano can hit a reverbed falsetto, and the ghostly space in his guitar work, certainly calls to mind fellow Midwestern outfit Bon Iver, and the gravelly curl he puts in his voice on “Down, Down, Down” bears more than a passing resemblance to M. Ward. Couple those sorts of moments with their folk-driven sound, and there’s a real chance these guys could get lost in the shuffle.

Those comparisons are ours to set aside, not theirs to disprove, because Pisano and Moen have a sound that is, yes, very much a sound of today. But it also taps into sounds that have been around for ages, and the way they combine them on Inter-Be, the way they exist between the past and the present, is what makes these songs so arresting.

On one hand, the elements seem simple here: Pisano’s echoed voice, the bluesy, low-end pluck of his guitar, Moen thundering on the drums deep down in the track, and some keys and vocals to fill in the chasm between them. However, the way they combine those elements, and the different paths they take with them, is the real success here. It’s also what sets up this other feeling of being “inter”, or being between.

This is an album of transition, to be sure. The excellent opener “Crutch & Cane” finds Pisano grasping at the past. “Where is my childhood begging to, please, stay?” he howls on the track, and the falsetto of the chorus that follows drives home the yearning in this song, if not to go backwards, at least to find a familiar comfort as he’s cast into the unknown ahead. “Hard As Nails” follows with a sinister rumble, as Moen’s tom-work on the drums churns the song up, capturing all of its dark searching. That wish for childhood gone unfulfilled, Pisano trudged forward, weary but pushing forward.