HEAVY TIMES: “It feels like every thinking person realizes there’s something off right now; there’s an incongruence that can’t be explained,” said Aan’s Bud Wilson, lead singer to the indie-rock, prog-pop band from Portland, Oregon, who plays the Funzone on Sunday, January 29, at 8 p.m., with L.A.’s Waterslice and two Goleta- and S.B.-born bands, The Flying Garbage and The Greens of Montenegro. “It’s like some sort of cosmic shift. I keep waiting for them to discover the poles have switched.”
Wilson has wrestled with some deep personal darkness over the last few years just as the world took a turn for the darkly incomprehensible. From 2015 to our present day, Wilson endured the deaths of his father and two close friends, the end of a six-year relationship, and the dissolution of Aan’s original lineup. The band that had once toured with the likes of Smashing Pumpkins and Built to Spill had skidded into uncertainty, just as Wilson’s personal life seemed again and again to be struck with grief and difficulty. Even as we spoke, his new girlfriend had just suffered multiple fractures in her arm days before, her limb crooked in an S-shape from a slip on unprecedented Portland snowfall ice.
And yet out of these rough times, Wilson wrote an album brimming with brightness along with its heavier, darker surges of guitar distortion. Titled Dada Distractions, the album has a spirit of lighthearted freedom and rebirthed vitality, a counterbalance to the woe. “There’s a playfulness to the music; everything is in jest. It’s not heavy for its own sake. I try to have balance of light and dark,” he said. “When things were getting kind of heavy for me, a lot of it seemed absurd. I like the term ‘Dada’ as just being absurdist, and I felt like things were so out of control it resonated with me. Distractions were kind of representative of everything pulling away from the task at hand.”