Review from Lucid Culture

With two guitars, keyboards, upright bass and trumpet, And the Wiremen (don’t bother googling to find where they got the name) closed the evening with a gorgeous, reverb-drenched set that mixed a couple of ... indie rock songs in with a bunch of haunting, southwestern gothic compositions. Their first number held hypnotically on a single chord til its anthemic chorus kicked in, with an ominous, tremolo wail from the lead guitar. Frontman Lynn Wright has played with a million other good bands, including Rev. Vince Anderson, Bee & Flower and Cordero. In this unit, he’s taken on the role of bandleader and minimalist, darkly terse rhythm guitarist. Their brooding, pensive songs occasionally building to unbridled rage, they’re the kind of band that would be headlining Tonic on a Saturday night if a greedy landlord hadn’t put the club out of business.

The second song of the set was a beautifully eerie, bluesy southwestern gothic dirge, “sleeping while the world goes by,” trumpet floating over the ominous clang of the guitars, then building to a tastefully minimalist guitar solo. A couple of later numbers featured some spooky, pointillistic tremolo-picking. Wallfisch joined them on a slinky noir cabaret number and didn’t waste any time turning in the best solo of the night, a matter-of-factly macabre, flamenco-inflected descending progression that ended the song with particularly dark intensity.