• Courtesy
• WiseAcres, Anchor

(Self-released, digital)

Music writers might be thinning out more quickly than glaciers, but we do occasionally still congregate. Not so long ago at a music festival, a contemporary from another market asked me, "What's going on with the jam bands these days?"

I replied with a polite version of How the fuck should I know?

"Well, Burlington is on the front lines for that genre, isn't it?" the other writer said. "I figure if anyone is going to know what's happening with it, it's you."

A sort of panic came over me, not unlike the feeling of blanking on a homework assignment. Jesus, was I supposed to be paying attention to the jam bands for signs of evolution? The jam crowd know what they like and like what they know. Right?

Nature abhors an uninformed critic, however. Vermont jam bands have been submitting so much music lately that I've been worried someone dosed our office coffee. (Now there's a theme issue I can get behind: The Seven Days Trips Balls Issue.) But, on the plus side, the trend helped solve the admittedly minor existential crisis spurred by that other music writer's query.

My usual complaint about the genre isn't so much that I think it sucks as that it tends to be predictable. Lately, though, I've seen some jam records on the opposite end of the spectrum: progressive, surprising, artistically crafted records that just might show the face of jam to come.

The debut LP from Burlington's WiseAcres, Anchor, is just such a record. Granted, I'm not entirely sure it is a jam band album. The quartet of Ben Gamache (bass, vocals), Isaac Chadwick (drums, vocals), Pat McGinn (keys, vocals) and Seth Vaczy (guitar, vocals) does away with most of the genre's conventions. Not a single song tops the six-minute mark, there's nary a bass solo, and the only tune with food in its title ("Pitted Olive") is borderline death metal.

But Anchor does flit between genres like a bee on pollen parade. The band dabbles in white-dude reggae-adjacent music (a telltale jam trait) on tunes such as "How It Makes You Feel," but that song has a stronger line of prog rock running through it than the arrangements favored by crunchier bands. WiseAcres touch on new wave-leaning neo-soul with "Bone Bread" and access space funk and jazz on "Adjust the Angles."

Listening to "Save It Up," which jumps in and out of jazz and indie rock seamlessly, you realize that WiseAcres actually do what most jam bands only claim to. Let me explain.

Often, jam bands don't want to identify as such — and, really, I get that. So they describe themselves as a funk band or a soul-meets-reggae-meets-bluegrass act. But as soon as the album starts to spin, you realize it's just an 11-minute song called "Coaxial Fibrillation Meatball Comedown, Pt. II."

WiseAcres, by contrast, cram all of their influences into a Cuisinart and actually do produce original results. It's enough to give a music critic yet another existential crisis. If the new wave of jam bands follows the example of WiseAcres with Anchor and synthesizes its influences into something shiny and new instead of fetishizing its predecessors, we just might be on to something.

Anchor is streaming now on Spotify.