Culminating their tour behind this year's great album Dulling the Horns, Wild Pink played to sold-out crowds all weekend long at Union Pool in Williamsburg and Sunday's show felt like a fitting finale. Packing the stage, the quartet filled the room with lush, enriching guitar tones that flooded the room with waves of distortion and flowing riffs. Buzzing guitar lines created towering walls of blown-out sound that smothered the room like a blanked of warm, fuzzy tones that were undercut by singer John Ross' soft and rather deadpan vocals. Drawing mostly from the new record, the band really dug their heels into the massive weight of the tracks, the swelling guitar acting as the driving force of the band's focus as the thundering drums crashed in the background to really deliver on the classic rock influences. While there's a clear line of inspiration from '80s heartland rock in the vein of classic Tom Petty and Bruce Springsteen vibes, there's also the dabbling in dreamy slowcore aesthetics in the hazy atmospherics of their melodies and heavy shoegaze demeanor in the crunch of the guitar. The addition of pedal steel and saxophone only added to the band's swarming textures and highlighted new elements of their sound. The sparkling propulsion of "See You Better Now" from 2022's ILYSM fit nicely into the set and helped bridge the gap from the band's earlier, more electronic-tinged tunes into their reformatted move towards something more muscular and deep. Barely speaking to the crowd, Ross sequenced each song into the next, perfecting each transition to not waste a single second and gave the set a unifying feel that led us all on a journey together. Dishing out heavy helpings of bleeding guitar, ragged bass, and pounding drums, the sheer mass of these songs felt larger than life and wrapped the room in a welcoming embrace that felt like a reassuring hug. It was easy to get lost in the sounds of the epic riffage and the blasts of oozing guitar licks hit like a sauna and steamed up the place with the rich, opulent reverb that drenched the room. Still, as sweeping as the music was, the band's energy kept things at a relatively calm level and allowed it all to wash over us with relative ease, occasionally stoking the crowd's desire to sway and slowly nod along to the more surging moments, but otherwise placed us all in a daze of the purest delights. After a quick encore, the band came back one more time even after half the crowd had already made their way out and treated those remaining to a breezy cover of Modest Mouse's classic "3rd Planet," giving the track a reimagined twist that slowed things down for a more gentle rendition to put a touching finish on an already wonderful night.
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