“We’ve kinda found that people really dig one record of ours or another, and then kinda want that version of Wheat to be the one that they always get,” said Brendan Harney, one half of the Boston-area indie-pop band, in a recent interview for the website of Express, an offshoot of the Washington Post. “And that seems to leave a trail of disappointment here and there. We are a tough band to follow ’cause of the constant changing, but, you know, ‘Change is / The better part of me.’”
Harney was borrowing a couple lines from “Changes Is,” one of the highlights of Wheat’s latest album, White Ink Black Ink (The Rebel Group): “Change is / The better part of me / Boom, boom / I’m getting out of here.” In that simple sing-along chorus, he and his partner, Scott Levesque, encapsulate all that is good about Wheat: a never-ending exploration of pop melodies backed by a propulsive rhythm that represents the heartbeat of their life-affirming music.
Like Radiohead or Wilco, Wheat switch gears with each album. “It’s not [about] being willfully obscure; it’s more about being very easily bored,” Harney told Express’s Christopher Porter, “and never wanting to even come close to repeating ourselves. We really do love pop, but we really also do love strange and difficult beauty.”
But unlike Radiohead or Wilco, Wheat remain relatively obscure in terms of popularity, having recorded for four different labels over the course of five albums. And that’s a real shame, because their third LP, 2003’s Per Second, Per Second, Per Second … Every Second, is the best album of the decade. (That’s another discussion for another day, of course.) Wheat create soaring anthems big enough to fill stadiums. If only enough people were familiar with their work to fill those stadiums …
