Attica!

As the story goes, Wussy formed in Cincinnati in 2001 when former Ass Ponys frontman Chuck Cleaver wanted to play some solo shows but was too scared to play material on his own, so he recruited Lisa Walker to sing and play guitar with him. It worked so well they kept it up and began writing songs together, eventually forming a full band with Mark Messerly (bass) and Joe Klug (Wussy’s second drummer). For Attica!, Wussy also brought pedal-steel player and former Ass Pony John Erhardt into the fold.

Wussy is quintessentially Midwestern. It’s hard to imagine their sincere, blue-collar, decidedly untrendy songs coming from either coast. The band doesn’t hesitate to borrow some alt-country sounds from Cleaver’s days in the Ass Ponys, but even with that pedal steel there’s nothing Southern about Wussy. They sound like a band from the early- to mid-’90s, but they’re not overly grungy, and you can’t really fold them in with much of the college rock from that decade, either. There are big hooks, drones, acoustic instruments, mellotron, fuzz. Wussy is familiar yet wonderfully uncategorizable. It’s the sound you’d hope would result from a grizzly stonemason now in his mid-’50s recruiting a woman almost 20 years younger to not just accompany but co-lead a band of fellow Ohioans who love rock that pops.

Buckeye, a compilation released on UK label Damnably in 2012, collected 17 of Wussy’s greatest hits that never were from previous albums. It’s a good place to start for newbies, but Attica! is a perfectly fine entry point, as well; Walker and Cleaver get an equal shake on just about every release. It’s surprisingly rare to hear arguments about who’s the greater or preferred Wussy warbler. Walker’s range and clarity would win in a reality show sing-off, but the two voices have a lot in common. They share a rumpled desperation that somehow never sounds resigned, kicking hard enough to keep ever-encroaching despair from taking over completely.

Attica!—Wussy’s fifth album of new material if you don’t count 2011’s Funeral Dress II, an acoustic reworking of 2005 debut Funeral Dress—is a nostalgic record, and not just because of that vaguely ’90s sound. It’s an album about growing up and remembering and, of course, the relationships that accompany those remembrances. (It seems worth noting that Cleaver and Walker were in a long-term, tempestuous romantic relationship in the not too distant past.) The album showcases everything Wussy is good at, particularly the band’s portrayal of their fractured homeland. You can see it vividly in the broken-down Pontiacs and frozen lakes and women too poor to take the pill and street drinking and house fires started by cigarettes.

If a song title like “Rainbows and Butterflies” brings to mind Owl City or Lisa Frank, the song’s crunchy power chords, which deconstruct slightly as they go, erase all that, providing a dark backdrop to Cleaver’s couplets that start off troubling (“I’m gonna kill you…”) and resolve as lovey-dovey promises (“...with goodness and light”). It’s something Wussy does all over Attica!, and what they’ve always done. Cleaver and Walker like to set up a lyric in a way you think you know where it’s going right before it goes somewhere else entirely. “I’m not the monster that I once was/ 20 years ago I was more beautiful than I am today,” they sing in unison on anthemic closing track “Beautiful.” (The song’s two-chord progression bears a strong resemblance to “Little Paper Birds,” leadoff track on Wussy’s self-titled 2009 album.) The refrain repeats until you start to realize what’s beautiful to Wussy and what’s not.

Even with a minute-long instrumental outro, “Beautiful” feels tight, ending before the 4:30 mark. Wussy songs tend to be that way—compact packages with maximum singability and staying power squeezed into minimal space. Sometimes the songs can feel too tight, if that’s even a thing. When I saw Wussy play “Beautiful” at last year’s Nelsonville Music Festival, they stretched out the ending until the seams frayed; the mantra-like chorus, drone-fuzz guitars and strummed bass erupted like a lost Yo La Tengo outtake. Perhaps “Beautiful” was destined to be more taut when put to tape, but there’s some unspent potential energy in the Attica! version’s coda.

Walker pays homage to the Who in first track “Teenage Wasteland", a pop song that rivals its namesake. She references “Baba O’Riley” and the band’s legendarily explosive Smothers Brothers Comedy Hour performance (“When the kick of the drum went off like artillery fire”), but it’s less about classic-rock head nods and double entendres and more about capturing what it’s like to be a kid and finding a band you connect with on the deepest level imaginable. “Do you remember the moment you finally did something about it? When the kick of the drum lined up with the beat of your heart?” Walker asks at the top of the song. Then, at the end of the song—sounding as if she can’t contain the exhilaration—she describes the feeling in more detail: “For one short breath it sounds like the world is ending, exploding in space and beginning again so far away.” It’s the moment that turns suffering into transcendence because someone else feels the way you do, and that person felt compelled to translate it into music. I’d argue that’s what we’re looking for most of the time when we listen to music—that band or album or song or even a few notes that make us marvel and proclaim, like Walker does, “Your misery sounds so much like ours.” At Wussy’s best—and Attica! is pretty close to that—they’re capable of doing for us what Pete and Roger and Keith and John did for them.