Mike Adams at His Honest Weight – Oscillate Wisely (10th Anniversary Edition) [Audio CD]

Description

Debut LP, 10th Year Anniversary Reissue on Silver Colored Vinyl, Deluxe mirror board jacket, includes CD insert of Oscillate Wisely (2021), with expanded liner notes by Eric Harvey. Bonus Video + Audio of Live recordings included in Digital Download. Recommended If You Like: Pedro The Lion, The Sea and Cake, David Bazan, Major Murphy, Kurt Vonnegut & Guided by Voices. For ten years now, Ive understood Oscillate Wisely as a play on the Smiths instrumental Oscillate Wildly–itself, of course, a pun on Morrisseys muse, Oscar Wilde. This is not to say that anything about Mike Adams and his band reminds me of the Smiths (especially Morrissey), as much as the idea that rock bands like Mike Adams At His Honest Weight take shape more or less as a thesaurus of past ideas–winking at them, borrowing them like a library book, checking them out from across the room, cloning them. But the best stuff is more ineffable, far more than just cut-and-paste. Theres a weird grandeur to Adams’ music, starting with that fully formed, geekily majestic 2011 debut LP Oscillate Wisely, that I dont hear in anything else, before or since. A sense that Adams is guiding his listeners toward a cosmic joke so personal, so inscrutable, so funny (funny), if you give him your attention. It’s in his blood, I think. He’s not Oscar Wilde, but a uniquely Midwestern type of deeply sincere romantic and dyed-in-the-wool goofball cast from the mold of Hoosier icons like Letterman and Vonnegut. He doesnt want to believe in anything, he didnt create this body, he loves a parade. Its all in fun, but it gets so personal. Onstage, Adams is gregarious and playfully self-effacing, a college town denizen telescoping backwards to the brief early 90s moment when college rock entered the corporate suite, and performers forced to become showmen retreated to the comfort of their native tongue: irony. And Oscillate Wisely has demonstrated for a decade that earnestness and sarcasm are as intricately bound in rock and roll’s lingua francas hang-ups and chill hangs. Ive never heard any musician summon everything I love about being from Indiana so perfectly. And Im fuckking old. Eric Harvey.