The Knot

I watched a DVD of Frozen River over the weekend and thanked the good Lord I didn’t believe in that the protagonist’s circumstances were not my own. Released to immense acclaim at last year’s Sundance Film Festival, Frozen River plants its focus on Ray Eddy, an upstate New York trailer mom with two sons and a minimum wage job, whose husband (the boys’ father) has just run off with the cash Ray was about to spend on a new double-wide trailer to re place their current rat hole. Saddled with this promise to her family, as well as the daily struggle to keep them fed, Ray reluctantly enters the dangerous world of illegal immigration to make several thousand quick bucks, smuggling Korean and Pakistani immigrants across the US-Canadian border in the trunk of her car. Not a thriller, per se, Frozen River is a stark look at simple economic survival that just happens to be really, really scary. More than anything else, it’s a story about money—its power to hold relationships together or tear them apart—and a mother’s desperate attempts to shield her young children from a painful reality.

Wye Oak's debut, If Children, was a small, surprising record. Surprising because it was the sound of two kids, barely 21, playing earnest, noisy folk-rock that ignored nearly every trend in indie music; surprising because it came out of Baltimore, a city whose indie scene-- lead by Dan Deacon and bands like Ponytail-- is publicized for its spasm and flash. Surprising because of the sympathy in Jenn Wasner's lyrics. Most of the songs on the album were about age and domes ticity, and most of the time it was impossible to gauge how old or domestic the band was. The character of Wasner's voice flickered between baby bunny and bitter wife, and swelling, muscular moments in the music were as confidently handled as the quiet ones.