Oscillate Wisely : 10Th Anniversary Edition

Description

The title of this album, Oscillate Wisely, is a play on The Smiths' instrumental "Oscillate Wildly" — itself, of course, a play on Morrissey's muse, Oscar Wilde. That doesn't mean his music sounds like The Smiths, but rather that rock bands like Mike Adams At His Honest Weight take shape more or less like a thesaurus of past ideas — winking at them, borrowing them like library books, sizing them up from afar, cloning them. However, the best things are more ineffable, far more than simple copy-paste. There is a strange grandeur in Mike Adams' music, starting with this debut album from 2011, Oscillate Wisely, already fully developed and majestic, that you hear in no other record, before or since. The feeling that he is guiding his listeners toward a cosmic joke so personal, so impenetrable, so funny, if you give him your attention. He is not Oscar Wilde, but the kind of deeply sincere romantic, pure and hardcore joker you only find in the Midwest, cut from the same mold as Indiana icons like David Letterman and Kurt Vonnegut. It's for fun, but it can get very personal. And Oscillate Wisely has demonstrated for a decade that seriousness and sarcasm are intimately linked in the lingua franca of rock 'n' roll. Never has a musician so perfectly evoked everything we love about Indiana! B-side including the 2021 version of the album remixed by Adam Jessup