Music

Jagjaguwar Signs Peter Wolf Crier

Trevor Kupfer, photos by Stacy Schwartz |

Peter Wolf Crier’s debut album, Inter-Be, launched only a few months ago, yet it is the latest regional music project slated for the oxymoronic “indie big time” with the announcement of a spring re-release by the label Jagjaguwar (the same of Bon Iver). The two-piece band has been in the works for about a year now, and is a bit of a retreat from what Peter Pisano (Wars of 1812) and Brian Moen (Laarks) have done before. PWC will no doubt be dubbed “indie,” but certainly shouldn’t be followed by “rock.” Pisano’s voice is a subtle drone that, rejoicingly, isn’t whiny or falsetto, and Moen’s drumming isn’t the driving force we’ve heard before in his Eau Claire projects (ranging from the aforementioned Laarks to Amateur Love and Echo Bravo), but instead meets Pisano’s distortion-and reverb-clouded riffs on a middle ground, resulting in what might be called “lo-fi folk meets gritty blues.” The band flaunts an “oldness,” from the crackling sound of their equipment (a hole-riddled amp and garage sale drum kit) to the thrown-togetherness of music that just came to them and they might have first played on a rickety porch (but probably didn’t). The tracks Untitled 101 and Crutch and Cane are already getting airplay on The Current, and PCW just finished a three-day stint at South by Southwest in Austin. A video of their main gig there popped up on the homepage of YouTube, gaining more than 70,000 views in the first 24 hours. So presumably, it’s onward and upward from here. There’s a dark beauty and unnamable mystery to Inter-Be that requires repeated listens to properly soak in. Thanks to Jagjaguwar, we’ll get that.