Dylan Williams on The Meadowlands from New Jersey’s eternally uncompromising The Wrens, who really shouldn’t stick to their day jobs

Readers can be forgiven if they haven’t yet encountered The Wrens. A seven year break followed their frenetic second album and 2003’s The Meadowlands, with poor label relations killing any momentum gathered by the brilliance of their previous effort.

They rarely leave New Jersey’s proximity for scarce live performances and The Meadowlands is their sole album released this decade. They’re prolific by the standards of Axl Rose, but are bordering hermetic by anyone else’s. Judging by either productivity or popularity, they are not The E Street Band.

When they finally pushed out The Meadowlands, the trajectory of The Wrens had rifled destructively off course. They appeared as a promisingly fervent band in their 20s but after the myriad of difficulties they faced, they re-emerged tired, defeated men approaching middle-age.

It is, primarily, the documentation of a band reflecting on the failures in their lives, and one of stark, humourless clarity. Their marriages have died and they are selling houses or working in construction in Secaucus these days, not playing stadium tours or breezing through the summer festival circuit. 

Chillingly sensitive letters to former partners are dispersed throughout: ‘Hopeless’, ‘She Sends Kisses’, ‘Ex-Girl Collection’. After all, this album is chalking up their disappointments, where going through lists of ex-girlfriends is “how men mark time”.

But by no means is The Meadowlands a morose listen or painfully self-deprecating. They may be recording through dusty pick-ups in some basement- maybe of the amber-toned house gracing the cover- but they’re often fiercely using their music to vent emotional exhaustion.

 ‘Boys, You Won’t Remember’ displays open resilience and the grainy, savage guitars of ‘everyone chooses sides’ is a final, rousing stand before the album slides to its conclusion in a beautifully sad crawl into the sunset of another doomed relationship with ’13 Months In 6 Minutes’.  

For me, The Meadowlands transcends a truly accomplished album; it’s a testament to the stifled genius of a band who never made it, but who still love music enough to hone their rusty talents and channel the weary sense of lost opportunities and nostalgia creeping in with age. This fate faces all but a few lucky bands, but none have addressed it on record like The Wrens.