Review: Wilder Woods Delves Into Southern Rock and Soul with 'Fever / Sky'
Wilder Woods is the solo project of Bear Rinehart, vocalist for Christian rockers NEEDTOBREATHE. Having never been a fan of the band, I went into listening to his new album Fever / Sky expecting very little. I was pleasantly surprised. While Rinehart's voice retains some of the sound that you hear fronting his band, he does an admirable job of separating the solo project from the primary with heavy doses of Southern rock guitar and soulful choruses.
Nowhere is that change more evident than on the album's opening track, and first single, “Maestro (Tears Don't Lie).” There's a vibe of Nathaniel Rateliff or Shinyribs on this Muscle Shoals-infused rocker. It's a song that is big everywhere. Big guitar licks. Big choruses. Big organ solos. Big throaty vocals. Even the lyrics are big, with Rinehart singing “Throw me out like the change in your pockets, baby. Move on.”
Another rocker highlighting the album is “Be the Man.” Anchored by a fat ZZ Top-esque guitar lick, Rinehart wails “I can't help it. I was was born selfish. Tired of being all that I am.” Later he notes that trying to “Be the Man” isn't all it's cracked up to be. “Got my face up on a building but I'm short on cash.”
On the slower side there's the album's second single, “Get It Back.” Over an almost military drum beat, Rinehart weaves a tale of lessons learned too late in life. “They keep saying 'Son it'll be alright', but the hands on the clock don't lie.” In the chorus, he laments that “I wish I would have known that when you give your heart to someone you might never get it back.”
I was surprised how much I enjoyed Fever / Sky. The great thing about a side project is that it allows you to stretch in ways that doesn't fit your primary band's style. Otherwise,what's the point? For Bear Rinehart, Wilder Woods is an opportunity to delve into the world of soul and he pulls it off well.
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Check This: Wilder Woods - Maestro (Tears Don't Lie)
Check This: @iamwilderwoods - Maestro (Tears Don't Lie)
First single from roots-rock singer's sophomore album is a soulful, rocking rave-up
@AllEyesMedia @DualtoneRecords #newmusic #rock #soul #classicrock #RnB #WilderWoods #Maestro
Artist: Wilder Woods
Song: “Maestro (Tears Don’t Lie)”
Album: Fever/Sky (March 24, 2023)
Label: Dualtone Records
Genre: Rock, Soul
Better known as the frontman for alt pop rock band NEEDTOBREATHE, Bear Rinehart uses his side project Wilder Woods (named after two of his sons) as a way to experiment with different sounds. After releasing his debut album in 2019, Rinehart spent the pandemic…
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Sharing my favorite albums from 2023 🎧
I have a soft spot for albums that feel whole. I'm hoping that my list reflects that.
Starting (in no particular order)
Roses N Guns by Skott
Favorite song: Memory Shore
Post-American by MSPAINT
Favorite song: Titan of Hope
Cuts & Bruises by Inhaler
Favorite song: So Far So Good
FEVER / SKY by Wilder Woods
Favorite song: Heartland
TIZA by MEG MYERS
Favorite song: MY MIRROR
It's Never Fair, Always True by JAWNY
Favorite song: death is a dj
Embrace by Roosevelt
Favorite song: Paralyzed
Something to Give Each Other by Troye Sivan
Favorite song: One of Your Grils
So Much (For) Stardust by Fall Out Boy
Favorite song: Hold Me Like a Grudge
The Rise and Fall of a Midwest Princess by Chappell Roan
Favorite song: Kaleidoscope
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There’s a line from American Gods I keep coming back to in relation to Yellowjackets, an observation made early on by Shadow in prison: “The kind of behavior that works in a specialized environment, such as prison, can fail to work and in fact become harmful when used outside such an environment.” I keep rotating it in my head in thinking about the six survivors, the roles they occupy in the wilderness, and the way the show depicts them as adults in society.
Because in the wilderness, as in prison, they’re trapped—they’re suffering, they’re traumatized, they’re terrified—but they’re also able to construct very specific boxes to live in. And, in a way, that might make it easier. Cut away the fat, narrow the story down to its base arc. You are no longer the complex young woman who weighs a moral compass before acting. You no longer have the luxury of asking questions. You are a survivor. You have only to get to the next day.
Shauna: the scribe. Lottie: the prophet. Van: the acolyte. Taissa: the skeptic. Misty: the knight. Natalie: the queen. Neat, orderly, the bricks of a new kind of society. And it works in the woods; we know this because these six survive. (Add Travis: the hunter, while you’re at it, because he does make it to adulthood).
But then they’re rescued. And it’s not just lost purpose and PTSD they’re dealing with now, but a loss of that intrinsic identity each built in the woods. How do you go home again? How do you rejoin a so-called civilized world, where all the violence is restricted to a soccer field, to an argument, to your own nightmares?
How does the scribe, the one who wrote it all out in black and white to make sense of the horrors, cope with a world that would actively reject her story? She locks that story away. But she can’t stop turning it over in her head. She can’t forget the details. They’re waiting around every corner. In the husband beside her in bed. In the child she can’t connect with across the table. In the best friend whose parents draw her in, make her the object of their grief, the friend who lives on in every corner of their hometown. She can’t forget, so she tries so hard to write a different kind of story instead, to fool everyone into seeing the soft maternal mask and not the butcher beneath, and she winds up with blood on her hands just the same.
How does the prophet come back from the religion a desperate group made of her, a group that took her tortured visions, her slipping mental health, and built a hungry need around the very things whittling her down? She builds over the bones. She creates a place out of all that well-intended damage, and she tells herself she’s helping, she’s saving them, she has to save them, because the world is greedy and needs a leader, needs a martyr, needs someone to stand up tall and reassure everyone at the end of the day that they know what’s best. The world, any world, needs someone who will take those blows so the innocent don’t have to. She’s haunted by everyone she didn’t save, by the godhood assigned to her out of misplaced damage, and when the darkness comes knocking again, there is nothing else to do but repeat old rhymes until there is blood on her hands just the same.
How does the acolyte return to a world that cares nothing for the faith of the desperate, the faith that did nothing to save most of her friends, that indeed pushed her to destroy? She runs from it. She dives into things that are safe to believe in, things that rescue lonely girls from rough home lives, things that show a young queer kid there’s still sunshine out there somewhere. She delves into fiction, makes a home inside old stories to which she already knows the endings, coaxes herself away from the belief that damned her and into a cinemascope safety net where the real stuff never has to get in. She teaches herself surface-level interests, she avoids anything she might believe in too deeply, and still she’s dragged back to the place where blood winds up on her hands just the same.
How does the skeptic make peace with the things she knows happened, the things that she did even without meaning to, without realizing? She buries them. She leans hard into a refusal to believe those skeletons could ever crawl back out of the graves she stuffed them into, because belief is in some ways the opposite of control. She doesn’t talk to her wife. She doesn’t talk to anyone. It’s not about what’s underneath the surface, because that’s just a mess, so instead she actively discounts the girl she became in the woods. She makes something new, something rational and orderly, someone who can’t fail. She polishes the picture to a shine, and she stands up straight, the model achievement. She goes about her original plan like it was always going to be that way, and she winds up with blood on her hands just the same.
How does the knight exist in a world with no one to serve, no one to protect, no reason propelling the devastating choices she had grown comfortable making? She rechannels it. She convinces herself she’s the smartest person in the room, the most capable, the most observant. She convinces herself other people’s mysteries are hers to solve, that she is helping in every single action she takes. She makes a career out of assisting the most fragile, the most helpless souls she can find, and she makes a hobby out of patrolling for crimes to solve, and when a chance comes to strap her armor back on and ride into battle, she rejoices in the return to normalcy. She craves that station as someone needed, someone to rely upon in the darkest of hours, and she winds up with blood on her hands because, in a way, she never left the wilderness at all.
How does the queen keep going without a queendom, without a pack, without people to lead past the horrors of tomorrow? She doesn’t. She simply does not know how. She scrounges for something, anything, that will make her feel connected to the world the way that team did. She moves in and out of a world that rejects trauma, punishes the traumatized, heckles the grieving as a spectacle. She finds comfort in the cohesive ritual of rehabilitation, this place where she gets so close to finding herself again, only to stumble when she opens her eyes and sees she’s alone. All those months feeding and guiding and gripping fast to the fight of making it to another day, and she no longer knows how to rest. How to let go without falling. She no longer wears a crown, and she never wanted it in the first place, so how on earth does she survive a world that doesn’t understand the guilt and shame of being made the centerpiece of a specialized environment you can never explain to anyone else? How, how, how do you survive without winding up with blood on your hands just the same?
All six of these girls found, for better or worse, a place in the woods. All six of them found, for better or worse, a reason to get up the next day. For each other. And then they go home, and even if they all stayed close, stayed friends, it’d still be like stepping out of chains for the first time in years. Where do you go? How do you make small choices when every decision for months was life or death? How do you keep the part of yourself stitched so innately into your survival in a world that would scream to see it? How do you do away with the survivor and still keep going?
They brought it back with them. Of course they did. It was the only way.
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