Wooden Wand & the World War IV is the brand new Wooden Wand album.
In addition to previous releases on Three Lobed, Wooden Wand has released music on Kill Rock Stars, Young God, De Stijl, Soft Abuse, Weird Forest, Troubleman Unlimited, Time-Lag, Fire Records and Ecstatic Peace!

Wooden Wand & The World War IV is from a physical edition of approximately 1000 copies and is pressed on 140 gram Dutch vinyl by Record Industry. The album is housed within a multi-color sleeve bearing original artwork by Eric Cooper. The album is also accompanied by a download coupon for DRM-free digital files of the downloader’s choice.
Wooden Wand & The World War IV was recorded Les Nuby III at Ol Elegante in Homewood, Alabama, and subsequently mastered by Patrick Klem.

Like its two predecessors, “Wooden Wand & the World War IV” was recorded down in Homewood with the same killer troupe of Birminghamians—a rare display of stability in a career heretofore marked by artistic restlessness. The self-title is the dead giveaway here, as this is a record that literally revels in the camaraderie of a band of likeminded musical souls that has now recorded three albums together and logged countless hours on the road.

The Lungfish-esque opener “Someday this Child Will Die” retains the creepy gait of the “Blood Oaths” set, but wraps it here in a tangle of three-guitar snarl. The song’s repeated pronouncements on mortality ratchet up the tension with each iteration, until the track breaks
completely around the halfway mark and the guitars begin shoving each other around over the locked groove of the rhythm section. The hectic second track, “Directions to Debbie Harry’s House” is even denser: a chorus of screaming guitars under Toth’s ominous refrain:
Wrapped up in the shroud/And you can’t get out. The dolorous and lovely “Complaint Dept” recalls the emotional immediacy of “Briarwood”: an American twilight with Janet Elizabeth Simpson’s haunting backing vocals shading in the crimsons and purples of the sunset.

The change of sides marks a real disjuncture: a band steeped in the ferocious efficiency of the 80’s SST catalog it grew up with suddenly find itself conjuring the 70’s guitar god decadence that informed its first glimmerings of musical consciousness. Toth himself
described the “World War IV” album as divided between a ruthlessly economical post-punk side A, scrubbed of keyboards and excess, and a side B dominated by colossal 70’s style stadium jams. The description is apt. Side B’s grand, apocalyptic “Our Father the Monster” plays like the stepchild of the Dead’s “Morning Dew” circa 1973, virtually demanding lighters in the air. (And the intertwined vocals of Toth and Simpson here have more than a little affinity with the stoner sublime of Black Mountain’s Stephen McBean and Amber Webber.) The psychedelic pomp of the album’s eight-minute closer, “McDonald’s on the Moon” features some of the finest guitar playing of Toth’s career, a bad-trip opus of serpentine guitars railing against the tawdry omnipresence of commerce.