Aeon Station’s “Observatory” is a beautiful, stirring, and bittersweet album on its own, made doubly so by the context of its creation and release. Aeon Station is Kevin Whelan, former co-lead songwriter of the Wrens, and he recorded “Observatory” with two other former Wrens—his brother, guitarist Greg Whelan, and drummer Jerry MacDonald.
What makes the context of the release of “Observatory” so interesting is that the announcement of the album also revealed that the Wrens were basically broken up. The Wrens last released an album in 2003, “The Meadowlands,” a pretty beloved album and one of my favorites from the early 2000s, and in the time since then, Charles Bissell, the other main songwriter in the band, had promised a number of times that their follow-up to “The Meadowlands” was almost done. Bissell has admitted before that he’s something of a perfectionist when it comes to tweaking tracks, and so when year after year passed with no new album, it seemed like maybe Bissell’s tinkering was holding it up. As articles in the New York Times and the Guardian have indicated, that was partly the case, but a new Wrens album was finished in 2019, save a handful of last touches. And then it sounds like the relationships within the band broke down after a disagreement over recognition, credit, maybe money. Bissell hasn’t really commented in full on what happened, but it sounds like he’ll release a statement at some point with his perspective.
Whelan took what would have been his half of a new Wrens record, wrote and recorded some more new songs, and now we have “Observatory.” Even without the backstory of its release, it’s a melancholy album, full of mourning for people and lost dreams. There’s a contrary-to-fact longing for things to have turned out differently, and agonizing over long-lasting regrets. Whelan sings about family, love, the death of his father, and his career with the Wrens. In a lot of ways, “Observatory” has an emotional tone similar to Radiohead’s “A Moon Shaped Pool” or Bright Eyes’ recent “Down in the Weeds, Where the World Once Was,” in that it finds a small, personal kernel of hope despite an overall surface vibe of retrospective despair. Whelan sings about the support of his family, his wife and kids, and seems to decide that it’s still worth trying—to make music, to make it—even if his dreams of success might have passed him by.
“Fade” is a good example of this. Over rumbling bass, quiet guitar, and delicate percussion (incredible drumming on this track from MacDonald), Whelan sings, “This life you make/is bound to fade/dreams grow old and waste away,” and then, later, “No matter the road you’re on, you fall at times/the weight of it all can pull you under/but have faith, get up, don’t fall apart/keep all your strength deep in your heart.” While the lyrics read on the page like an affirmation, when Whelan sings them, you feel it deeply. He’s expressing the kinds of sentiments you don’t understand and have no use for when you’re young, before the years have hung some real shit on you. This is someone singing honestly about harrowing experience or emotions, who’s been through some true sorrow.
“Alpine Drive,” another favorite, is the last track on the album. It’s a quiet, chiming, subdued love song, with Whelan singing about how he can’t wait to get back home. There’s some futzing distortion on the music here at points, like the song is travelling over trans-Atlantic phone lines, Whelan calling up his wife to let her know he’s on his way back. There’s also something Odyssean about this, the journey back after a long absence, which is especially interesting in relation to Bissell’s past comments about the Wrens new one (or just his songs?) having taken lyrical inspiration from “The Odyssey.”
It’s a shame that we’ll probably never get the new Wrens album in the form it was intended (though of course if Bissell releases his songs, it’ll be fascinating to combine the tracks into a jerry-rigged version). “Observatory” though is the closest thing we have to a “Meadowlands” follow-up and it’s as good as you could hope: it’s the same kind of rousing, kinetic music, with deeply personal and affecting lyrics, an album full of astounding songs.