To Be Stirred By Something

The Orielles “Wasp” The Orielles’ music mostly exists within the aesthetic boundaries of post-punk, but there’s a larger ambition to it that nudges their more recent material closer to film scores, conceptual art, and rock opera. The songs imply grand scale and dramatic arcs without providing a lot of clear cut narrative, though it’s easy to track the feelings. “Wasps” is something of an outlier, as it’s not as wistful or digressive as other tracks on Only You Left, but it’s a crucial bit of tension and catharsis on a record that often sounds like a field recording of a melancholy daydream. The arrangment is gnarled and absurdly tight, very similar to a lot of songs by The Smile. Esmé Hand-Halford sounds serene as she sings lyrics that remind me a lot of the detached, clinical, and observational tone of a lot of Wire’s songs. There’s a dense metaphor to unpack there, but the words that ring out feel very raw and direct: “This is you apart from me,” “Now you see that I can’t forget…