Wye Oak Is Back, and They’re Not Playing it Safe

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Wye Oak
Shriek
Merge

When a bandleader’s side project starts to influence her primary job, that sometimes means the original group has run out of steam and is headed for mothballs. Happily, that isn’t the case with the Baltimore folk-pop duo Wye Oak. Singer Jenn Wasner has returned from her detour in the groove-oriented Dungeonesse with renewed energy, rejoining Andy Stack to create Wye Oak 2.0, which replaces guitars with synths. The result is a deceptively subtle—and pleasing—blend of old and new. You can dance to the songs on Shriek, sometimes, but a look beneath the shiny surface reveals the same inventive melodies and thoughtful lyrics that made Wye Oak so rewarding in the first place. While purists might object, Wasner and Stack have done the band and its listeners a service by refusing to play it safe.

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WE'LL BE BLUNT

It is astonishingly hard keeping a newsroom afloat these days, and we need to raise $253,000 in online donations quickly, by October 7.

The short of it: Last year, we had to cut $1 million from our budget so we could have any chance of breaking even by the time our fiscal year ended in June. And despite a huge rally from so many of you leading up to the deadline, we still came up a bit short on the whole. We can’t let that happen again. We have no wiggle room to begin with, and now we have a hole to dig out of.

Readers also told us to just give it to you straight when we need to ask for your support, and seeing how matter-of-factly explaining our inner workings, our challenges and finances, can bring more of you in has been a real silver lining. So our online membership lead, Brian, lays it all out for you in his personal, insider account (that literally puts his skin in the game!) of how urgent things are right now.

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