For Wet Hair singer and keyboardist Shawn Reed, being experimental is the only thing he can do. "Unless it's weird and challenging, I'm just bored with it," he said in a phone interview this week. "It just doesn't feel important to me."
The surprise of last year's In Vogue Spirit was that the Iowa City band produced a batch of songs that was - for it - downright poppy.
That might seem like a contradiction unless you're familiar with Wet Hair's previous work, or the output of Reed's and bandmate Ryan Garbes' previous noise-rock outfit Raccoo-oo-oon. Pitchfork.com wrote that "in both Raccoo-oo-oon and Wet Hair, Garbes and Reed have been uncompromising in their pursuit of the outer limits. ... That hasn't changed. But with In Vogue Spirit, Garbes and Reed have delivered a more consistent, considered record. Space is still the place, but they've found shortcuts to getting there."
