We Are the Wilderness: Descending From Paramount

It’s a pretty big claim for a duo from Brooklyn — comprising players Shanda Woods and Ryan Manchester — to name themselves something as expansive as We Are the Wilderness. Lucky for them, their electronically inclined pop tunes sound like they took an army to make. Opener “Just for Now” rings with gauzy guitar phrasings, thundering drums, and Woods’ to-the-rafters singing. Here and on moodier turns later in the record — cascading “Dreams are Thoughts” or the expansive “Spiraling to Still” — the band is at full strength, meshing live instrumentation (especially those propulsive drums) with shimmering electro-textures.

Sometimes that shimmer is a bit too shiny, buffed to a hollow sheen on tracks such as “Outside Looking” and “Leading From Emptiness”. In these moments, the size becomes too crowded, the sweating pulse of the songs lost in a fog of keyboards and skittering beats. We Are the Wilderness has a name that implies size, but it’s when they balance that synthed-out size with the organic elements their name also implies that their tunes shine the brightest.