The sixth single from Wonderlick’s upcoming LP Undisciplined is a true story about a near-death experience singer and lyricist Tim Quirk had while traveling in Lithuania. He was most terrified about the potential bill, after two shots of painkillers, an ambulance ride to a nearby hospital, an emergency medical procedure, and a bottle of pills that will supposedly prevent the condition from ever recurring. But the total charge for all that was only 22 Euros. America’s health care system really sucks @ss, in comparison.
This video’s origin story begins when Tim’s dad sends him a $100 Amazon gift card for Christmas. Tim then spent $70 of that on a little GoPro-knockoff camera, and the remaining $30 on a remote controlled ambulance. He then re-lived his youth, when he used to make Super 8 films of his toys crashing into one another and catching on fire.
“Wonderlick has a single musical rule,” Tim explains: “You can’t say, ‘No.’ If one of us has an idea he wants to try, it has to be tried no matter how ridiculous the other one might think it is.”
“That might sound like a little thing,” says Jay Blumenfield, the other half of the duo and the one who writes and plays most of the music, “but it turns out to be rarer than you’d think, and embracing it as an ethos is wildly liberating. And we usually wind up pretty thrilled with whatever emerges, even if we don’t always understand it.”
What emerged this time around is Undisciplined, a collection of twelve contemplative tracks that ask the musical question, “What if Albert Camus wrote pop songs?” Though they grapple with how and why to be a good person in a meaningless world, the existential dilemmas never feel too heavy, floating dreamily in a bath of steady rhythms, melodic hooks, weirdly compelling synths and, when called for, crunching power chords that make the howls of despair feel somehow redemptive.
“Lithuanian Ambulance Ride” is the sixth single from Undisciplined. Previous singles were “Begin Again,” “Sob (Forever),” “Otis Redding’s Disco Album,” “Let Id Out” and “Muppet Legs.” The record was co-produced by band pal David Newton, who Tim and Jay first met way back in 1992 when their other band, Too Much Joy, toured with Dave’s band, The Mighty Lemon Drops.
The SF Chronicle described Wonderlick’s self-titled 2002 debut as, “sparse, startlingly beautiful,” and said it “unfolds like a fractured tone poem, swirling with layered harmonies and vocoder effects, guitar and drum loops, found sounds and samples.” While its follow-up, a bonafide rock opera Topless at the Arco Arena, took seven more years to complete, and their third album, Super, was assembled over another six, Undisciplined was mostly finished in two separate weekend sessions last summer at Rollercoaster Recordings in Burbank, California – a home studio overseen by David Newton, who Tim and Jay befriended back in 1992 when their earlier band, Too Much Joy, was touring with Dave’s group, The Mighty Lemon Drops. That decades-old camaraderie created an environment where the first take was often the best, leaving ample time to flesh out the tunes with whatever other instrumentation felt right, whether it’s a nostalgic keyboard line The Cars would have killed for in album opener “Self-Portrait with Bottle of Wine,” the lap-steel Dave added to closer “Letting Spiders Live,” or the pulsing electronics of “Otis Redding’s Disco Album,” which posits an alternate universe where the Big O never died and the population therefore lives in less pain than in our own benighted reality.
Throughout the disc, sentiments ping pong between selfishness and mercy just as the music swells from hushed reverence to bombastic fury. Sometimes, as on “Sob (Forever),” which is probably the secret heart of the album, all those things happen at once: after contemplating the Crusaders who carved crosses on the wall of the Church of the Holy Sepulchre in Jerusalem for every infidel they killed en route, Quirk insists, “I just want to love my neighbor,” while admitting, “neighbors make that hard for me,” and the drums (provided by TMJ bandmate Tommy Vinton) and guitars go wild in an ecstatic coda that feels like it might never end as the band stare down an eternity of potential misery.
Wonderlick may pride themselves on their lack of discipline, and several of the less savory characters in the songs may go unpunished, but Undisciplined is a work of admirable control, in which Wonderlick find themselves by admitting they have no real idea what they’re doing or why, but still resolve to find whatever meaning they can in every single moment granted to them.
