Review: Robber Robber – Wild Guess

Robber Robber
Wild Guess
Self-Released
Street: 06.26
Robber Robber = Parquet Courts’ Light Up Gold + Modest Mouse’s The Lonesome Crowded West

Back in 2021 when Robber Robber went by the name Guy Ferrari, they released a 14-minute EP titled Caldera and, while only five songs long, the project showed us their artistic flashes and rough edges. The EP lacked some confidence in the guitar work and lyricism that Wild Guess would later lead with and can, at times, feel like a katemined-out Parquet Courts circa 2013 in their riffs. Lead singer and founding member Nina Cates’ voice is a rarity on the EP and many of the tracks dive into some shoegaze-y breakdowns that show the foundation for the band’s ultimate sound. Shining examples of the elements that work well all appear on the second track “Lights Out,” which features strong, eerie vocals from Cates and grimy guitar work (though part of the riff does sound a bit like “Freak On A Leash” to my ear). That being said, Caldera is a looking glass into what the band could ultimately become and produce. 

Wild Guess is short—just 32 minutes—but nearly perfected. The album can be easily described as intentional disorder and mindful destruction, weaving in and out of more traditional post-punk grime and into a cacophony of wails. One of the group’s biggest strengths is their skill with volume, especially between Cates’ voice relative to the remaining instruments, at times blending into another harmonizing or discordant sound among the guitars and drums, abandoning lyrical clarity. While I love this attention to detail,it can bite the band in the ass, like on “Seven Houses,” which takes a Strokes approach to guitar work with a revolving, four-note chord played so oppressively that it can get annoying and make the track skippable on later listens. However, about halfway through, Cates joins the repetition by singing “Now, now” over and over, which adds some needed levity. And yet, Robber Robber is skilled at dropping into a more simplistic, groovy track, like in “Mouth,” “Back Up Plan” and “Dial Tone,” which are all the standout songs from this album. All three are very funny and sexy in their own way, especially “Dial Tone,” which is one of the few tracks that leads with the vocals forward, though it devolves into an incredible breakdown. The Parquet Courts, post-punk guitar style stays as the track “Back Up Plan” evolves into a similar breakdown to the one in “Stoned and Starving”—and that’s a very good thing. 

The final song on the album, “Machine Wall,” is in many ways equally distorted and hard-driving, but it spends much of the track fading off into the distance in a rather somber way. There is a longing to this whole album that I can’t quite pin down in anything other than the overall tonal quality. While the album ebbs from conceptual noise rock and flows into fun and punchy post-punk tracks, there is a cloud of deep desire and unrequited feeling that hangs over the project. Since the lyrics on the album are often hard to decipher (and intentionally so), Robber Robber instead brings their message through the musical quality itself and the structure of the album as the whole. Tension, release, desire and disappointment come through clearly, even without a lyric to back them up. There are, of course, high moments of fun and joy, but they often fall down to a tired and explorative baseline. 

Grimy and distorted to a thick TV-static fuzz, Robber Robber’s Wild Guess is a big leap from Caldera and delivers on almost all the promise they showed just three years prior. From Cates’ airy, often philosophical approach to vocals and lyrics to the relentless and punishing force the rest of the band has on every track, this project is smooth, polished and heavy to its core. While some have pronounced this newest wave of post-punk/post-rock dead or dying, Robber Robber is perhaps the genre’s death rattle. –wphughes

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