Release date: July 21st
Record label: Thrill Jockey
Genre: Fuzz rock, space rock, noise pop
Formats: Vinyl, digital
Upper Wilds continue to storm through our Solar System loudly and grandly with their fourth album. Jupiter is the Brooklyn trio’s third entry that started with 2018’s Mars, a science fiction concept album inspired by imagined future attempts to colonize the Red Planet, and continued with 2021’s Venus, which took inspiration from that planet’s namesake Roman goddess to present a collection of love songs. Dan Friel, Jason Binnick, and Jeff Ottenbacher’s planetary albums have always been ambitious, so it’s no surprise that their album based upon the largest planet in Earth’s neighborhood rises to the challenge. Jupiter perhaps has the loosest theme of the three, but it’s still very much there–Friel’s writing draws from the titular planet’s overwhelming mass to explore “scale and perspective” over the record’s eleven songs. With this in mind, Jupiter is effectively a distillation of what Upper Wilds has done for its entire existence–its songs mix transmissions from the vastness of space with Earth-bound stories of humans that, in one way or another, come close to transcending their terrestrial limits.
One major throughline of Jupiter is NASA’s Voyager space probes, and specifically the 1977 probe that contained the “Voyager Golden Record” intended to be played by any extraterrestrials that might stumble upon it (indeed, the physical vinyl record of Jupiter is “Voyager golden”). The record opens with the fifteen-second “Greetings”, taken from that Voyager record, and songs like “Drifters” and (of course) “Voyager” seem to ride along in space with the probes, soundtracked by Upper Wilds’ typically loud and catchy fuzz rock. Throughout Upper Wilds’ exploration of the cosmos, possible alien life has never figured heavily into Friel’s writing, and despite the purported mission of the Voyager Golden Record, Jupiter is no different. Friel’s perspective on the probe is one that is perhaps more interested in the achievements and characteristics of a humanity that would create such a vessel and choose to include in it the specific things in which they did, and the rest of the album explores a similar train of thought.
After the greeting, Jupiter opens with “Permanent Storm”, a song that begins on the planet’s Great Red Spot but (like Venus’ “Love Song #1”) it functions more as a thematic scene-setter than a physical one. Friel acknowledges that the eternal storm on Jupiter will exist long after him and that outer space contains “things that you and I will never see”, but the latter line shifts to “places I know I would like to see” in the next verse (but not before Friel acknowledges that space also features “so much there to kill us”). This juxtaposition between humanity’s inherent structural limits and whatever desire drives us to eternally push against them is what’s at the heart of Jupiter. Throughout Upper Wilds’ run, much of Friel’s songwriting has drawn from people he finds interesting and/or remarkable (“Roy Sullivan”, “Love Song #7”, “Love Song #6”), and at the heart of Jupiter is a pair of songs that reflect this particular well.
Although they may be the two most sonically distinct songs on the record, “Short Centuries” and “10’9”” are linked by Friel’s writing. Both are inspired by real people who, one way or another, etched themselves into history. “Short Centuries” is about Julio Mora and Waldramina Quinteros, the oldest married couple on Earth–on its surface, it feels like a more fitting subject for Venus than Jupiter, but the title of the song acknowledges the link. Friel reflects on how a human bond can, in its small way, mimic the eternity of space, over an instrumental that is relatively uncharted waters for Upper Wilds in its slow, deliberate, hymn-like march. The nearly seven-minute “10’9””, on the other hand, is the other end of Upper Wilds’ musical spectrum–a massive, towering piece of riff-heavy rock inspired by the tallest man in recorded history, Robert Wadlow. 10’9” was the necessary size of Wadlow’s coffin–a staggering number to imagine for a person, but, as the song acknowledges, it’s still paltry in comparison to the ever-expanding universe.
The song on Jupiter that most explicitly discusses extraterrestrial life isn’t penned by Friel–it’s an inspired take on Hüsker Dü’s “Books About UFOs”, one that the band both wholly makes into a clear “Upper Wilds song” but also gives an outlying twist with a blistering saxophone solo from Jeff Tobias. A cover of a band that was instrumental in combining loud noise, high energy, and massive pop hooks in indie rock is a no-brainer for Upper Wilds, although the swinging bar-rock of the original “Books About UFOs” is hardly the purest example of that side of Hüsker Dü–it’s the subject matter that makes it the right choice for Jupiter. Continuing the album’s theme, it should be noted that “Books About UFOs” is not a song about UFOs, but rather about a person obsessed with learning about and finding UFOs (and, mostly implicitly, the speaker’s infatuation with this person). This passion for discovery of the unknown and how it intersects with our human desires and wants is what puts “Books About UFOs” in line with the rest of Jupiter (and the cover also functions as a celebration of another of humanity’s great achievements: New Day Rising by Hüsker Dü).
Songs like “Radio to Forever” and “Infinity Drama” attempt to sprint out to eternity, even as the futility of this seems to hover over both of them–“Time is gonna sell us down the river,” Friel acknowledges in the former, and his plea of “Just don’t try to tell me how it ends” in the latter is, of course, pregnant with the knowledge that no one possesses that true answer. The album presses on, however. The title track to Jupiter begins with Friel staring at it all and observing “It’s bigger than our minds could know / So heavy that our hearts explode”. What follows is a relatively simple but undeniably huge song, featuring a massive hook in the chorus and an equally massive guitar riff–if you were going to choose one Upper Wilds song to preserve in order to explain this band long after the world as we know it disappears, it’d be hard to argue with this one. “We scratch our names into the dark / Just making sure to leave our mark,” Friel sings in the song’s next line, launching his golden record into the void for whomever to find. (Bandcamp link)
Rosy Overdrive 