arely have I, after so many listens, felt so outside a record. Music usually communicates with its audience, sparks an active dialogue that allows us, despite our distance and alienation, to feel at least a facsimile of communion. A few wry smiles—“I know why they did that”—or a crimson blush of familiar feeling. But Wooden Wand and the Vanishing Voice have created a record that renders one an observer rather than a participant. They’ve created a musical vocabulary transparent only to those within the tight-knit community of the band. Sure, the morphemes are familiar—hand percussion, dangling bells, snaking electric guitars, and clear, confident vocal melodies carrying messages of salvation and damnation—but they combine into an altogether alien tongue.

But Buck Dharma is not cold or inaccessible. On the contrary, the band, on their most widely distributed offering yet, polishes their sound considerably. Gone are the fifteen-minute-plus jams that made Un Marquer Contre la Moissonneuse or Sunset Sleeves such trips, replaced by a sharper focus on shorter rock and folk songs that, while present in prior releases, were overshadowed by the epic tracks.

The shift seems designed to distance the band from the New Weird America movement (which was more a matter of critical convenience than an actual movement in the first place) that they been so eagerly lumped with, and particularly from the Sunburned Hand Of Man improv side. Buck Dharma finds the band steeped more in classic acid rock rather than the Incredible String Band.

Their mission is made clear from the start when the clear guitar drops of “Hideous Whisker & His Woman” are pestered by a belt of crackly feedback. The track seems prepared to venture into a long landscape of guitar noodling and ambling electronics, but the band wisely resists the temptation. The following track, “Rot On,” pushes their acid rock aspirations at the forefront. Over incense-trails of flayed guitar, Wooden Wand moans of lonely sinners and lost innocence.

And here I began to feel like an outsider. The band’s explicit and near-constant religious themes are difficult for a listener to swallow, not because rock kids can’t handle Christian themes (surely the pop charts tell a different story, as does Sufjan Stevens’ success in the indie world), but because their vision seems closer to Flannery O’Connor and rural revivalism during the Great Awakening than to the user-friendly God peddled in mainstream America. The Devil is real, his temptation is constant, your soul is imperfect and in danger of corruption, and the Lord will give up on you if you don’t show yourself worthy of his love.

Their message is so uncompromising that one can’t tell if the group takes it seriously. Are the Seventh day Adventists and the Quakers just influences, like the blues or country traditions sampled here? Something to be name-checked and recreated, rather than believed? When a band makes use of a musical tradition it’s co-opting culture to a point, but such a flagrant reappropriation would make me uneasy.

But WWVV are too sincere to be playing preacher. What we hear is not a sermon, nor an ironic take on sermon, but a precarious middle ground. The band is manipulating Christian imagery to fit their beliefs, a system that embraces a God who likely does not match that envisioned by either Christian orthodoxy or almost anyone beyond themselves, be they believers or atheists. The listener lacks the knowledge to transcend the conventional meaning. Their music is ritual, but we cannot decipher it.

This is not a fault, but rather the bands most intriguing strength. Buck Dharma begs listeners to decode the band’s cryptic imagery while ensuring that we won’t be able to. The feeling of giving up, of accepting confusion and misinterpretation, is strangely wonderful.

Other obscure gestures are less amusing. Ten minutes of the album are wasted on the plodding “Satya Sai Baba Plays ‘Reverse Jam Band.’” The song appears to be a comment on the unsatisfying, overindulgent tendencies of jam bands. While WWVV might enjoy the joke, the song is no more than an unsatisfying, overindulgent jam lacking the pointless displays of virtuosity that at least provide variety in such songs.

Buck Dharma stays on the right side of obscurity most of the time, withholding enough to keep the listener engaged rather than frustrated. The percussive bombast and warm drone of “Steven Harvester O’er the Din of the The-The Cups” is a welcome left turn, something like a ramshackle marching band led by a guy holding down one note on a recorder. The following track, “I am the one I am and he is the Caretaker of my Heart,” is the closest WWVV will get to a single. An insistent turgid bassline drives Heidi Diehl’s religious musings. Here we find the band officially conflated with tribe: “I am the one I am, I belong to the band, I am the one I am.” Tinny acoustic plucks, triangle tinkles, and a later-arriving electric slide accent the point.

On the vinyl edition, side C continues with two exclusive tracks: “Snake Blues/Rational Blues” and “The Roebuck Song.” “Snake Blues” is the swampiest track on the album—humid ambience and a whooping crane flute canopy a timid guitar melody that crawls like a wary creature on the dry leaves. Snake hisses and insect chirps rise in the mix, only to be frightened away by a heavy drum beats reaching a ceremonial end. “The Roebuck Song” gathers shakers and reluctant bongos for a acid-drenched spoken word performance by Wooden Wand. Both are worthy additions to the album and far superior to “Satya Sai Baba Plays ‘Reverse Jam Band.’”

“Wicked World” ends the album with a warning to humanity. And so we find out why WWVV withdrew into their world. They’re fleeing the degradation of ours. I hope they find their Utopia, but if they do, none of us will know.