In Eliza Gilkyson’s “Solitary Singer,” she croons, “He sings his best when nobody’s listening.” Wax Cannon reminds me of that song.
A housepainter (David Murray) and a hospital pharmacy worker (Jay Miller) have been making music together for a quarter century, to no particular acclaim, except from their friends in the local scene, or me, when I review their CDs. (Full disclosure: I’ve known both members for decades.)
Teeth has a lot of commonality with previous Wax Cannon releases, which stands to reason. They’re still playing guitar and drums, still swapping instruments when they play live. Miller is a child of ’90s indie rock, so you can compare his songs to Yo La Tengo or Superchunk. Murray has been in local bands like Soviet Dissonance since the 1980s. His songs are darker and heavier than Miller’s. His singing is less pop, combining a Tom Waits growl with punk/straight edge yips and yowls.
On “Captain’s Worm” you get a dose of his phlegmy angry bark, along with a stomping beat and slashing guitar. “Your eye’s gleam/It’s ice cold” is about all I can glean without a lyric sheet. You can’t hear what either of them are saying, and it’s an artistic choice, a ’90s indie rock trope where voices are just another instrument.
The same can be said of Jay Miller’s lyrics, even though he sings more tunefully. I asked David once what Jay was singing in “Twelve Spaceships on the River” — from their incomparable double album Someone in Madison is Praying for You (and it’s not me) — and he laughed. “You think Jay tells me what he’s singing?”
You can pick out words here and there, but what the songs mean is tied more to the gestalt of guitar, drums and voice than to lyrics. There are plenty of two-person bands; take the White Stripes or the Black Keys. Those bands sound full because of loud, bluesy guitar and jackhammer drumming. Wax Cannon goes a different direction, with guitars that fill the sonic space usually taken up by several instruments.
That sound — which has something of Peter Buck’s iconic jangly guitar sound from R.E.M. — is the emotional center of their songs. You can hear the decades they’ve put into constructing this particular sound. If you go back to previous releases (a worthwhile pastime), you’ll notice they’ve traded loud and abrasive for something subtler on Teeth. They still have a love affair with brashly distorted guitars, but they’re not afraid to let the chords ring out. The overdrive amp and open strings create phantom melodies in the resulting overtones.
Wax Cannon is a band whose longevity, despite not “making it,” deserves celebration. Sure, they’re not great at self promotion, they only play live a few times a year and they’re dropping their music into a vast ocean of daily releases on Bandcamp. But they still have their surreal, hermetically sealed sense of humor. They’ve endured, and their songwriting has only grown more subtle and appealing. In a perfect world they’d be rock stars, but it isn’t and they’re not, and they’re OK with that. If you like Wax Cannon, spread the word. Maybe we can spoil their obscurity.
This article was originally published in Little Village’s January 2025 issue.