Silver

by Nitsuh Abebe. Like many early-nineties indie albums, Silver bears a slight and sometimes inappropriate influence from shoegazing and dreampop, which manifests itself in a slightly spacy haze. Underneath this lies what one could call the "true" sound of the Wrens, a typically American style somewhere between indie and straight-out rock; for every track where the band's songwriting grows appealingly abstract, there's another that descends into bland blues-based rock, and Silver comes out somewhat muddled because of this. Interestingly enough, the Wrens' later albums developed their own sound mainly by dropping the dreamy fuzz of Silver, a move which allowed the band's idiosyncracies to seem a bit clearer.