Like the rest of us, Imaad Wasif has a day job. While we slave away behind coffee shop counters or in amongst office cubicles, however, this singer-songwriter pays his electric bills as the tour guitarist for the Yeah Yeah Yeahs. It’s certainly a job with its perks, like, say, having your album portrait shot by Nick Zinner, but just like all our Frappuccino slinging and word processing, it’s probably not the first thing he tells people when they ask him what he does for a living. Instead, the music present on Wasif’s second solo record (his first joined by Two Part Beast) offers similar neo-psychedelia-filtered eastern music as much of the Brian Jonestown Massacre’s oeuvre or the lighter moments of Entrance’s back catalog.
It’s a sensibility that shines through the first handful of tracks on Strange Hexes, particularly the instantly likable leadoff track, “Wanderlusting”. The record loses a bit of steam around halfway through, but there’s enough evidence on Wasif’s sophomore LP that, with a little bit of focus, he may not have to keep slinging those proverbial Frappuccinos for long.
