Wally in 2019.
“No No,” the first song from Wally’s EP Live, starts with stacked, keening three-part harmonies that reach all the way back to the brother acts of the 1950s but feel very much of the moment. “I can’t love you anymore, but I’m trying,” they sing. The rest of the band falls in with a easy, lilting groove that seems both sunny and melancholy, like the last days of summer.
That’s before the guitar opens up with fuzzy distortion that lets the drums hit harder. Soon voices and instruments are all weaving together to bring the song to its emotional peak, before they all fall away — and then, suddenly, launch into high gear, complete with guitar and saxophone freakout.
It’s the sound of a band that’s been playing together for years, but is still full of ideas. Which makes sense: Wally — Alex Blair on guitar and vocals, Teo Hernandez on lead guitar and vocals, Lucas Hernandez on synth and vocals, Nick Abaunza on drums, Paul Gold Finger on bass, and Ben Eidson on alto saxophone — is made up of former ECA students. The group began gigging as Wally in 2017 as teenagers, performing at Best Video, Koffee?, and Toad’s Place, and in time hitting the road to Westport, New York City, and Boston. The band released its first recordings, the dreamy-sounding “Chamemilia,” “Hue,” and “Hiding Behind the Moon,” in 2018. “La Mer” found the group trying out a more expansive sound in 2019. According to the liner notes for Live, they returned to their old high school to record a quick session that appears to have been no trip down memory lane, but an exercise in making music for now.
“Arch” takes the band into more lush, expansive territory, featuring some lyrical playing from Eidson on sax, a welcome compliment to Blair’s and the Hernandez brothers’ tight harmonies. “Spirit” then swerves into full-on rock territory, complete with splashy drums and strutting guitar riffs. The band expertly brings the volume up and down, up and down, before unleashing its fullest sound yet for the song’s final minute, stripped back down at the very end to just voice and breathy saxophone.
There may be only three tracks on Live, but as the band forgoes traditional tight song structures for melodic and textural ideas that take more time to develop fully, the shortest number clocks in at over four minutes and the longest heads past seven minutes. The EP thus feels like a full statement, an album’s worth of concepts and emotions.
Wally’s last performance before the shutdown was in January, and in this young band’s history, it had already starting booking multiple band shows and helping raise money for causes like The Trevor Project, which offers crisis intervention and suicide prevention services to LGBTQ people under 25. Wally is a band with musically and socially auspicious beginnings, a band to look out for — whenever local stages reopen.
Live is available on Bandcamp.