For all their retroactively awarded praise, New Jersey’s terminally unlucky Wrens have yet to receive a thorough public excavation of their back catalogue. 2003’s The Meadowlands was a masterpiece, yes, and so was 1996’s Secaucus, albeit a jumpier, scatterbrained one not quite worth the $60 Amazon asks for it; but one gets the impression of treading forgotten territory when one queues up 1994’s Silver, a static-filled sprawl of a record which sounds on first listen and for the most part on every subsequent one like an impenetrable mess, and is, but which with patience yields a few nuggets of more than merely historical interest.

Most of Silver’s bright spots come when the fuzzy shoegaze influence fades, leaving the punky hyperactivity that was the Wrens’ pre-exhaustion trademark to shine through the way it would on Secaucus: the three-speed “Darlin’ Darlin’” lurches from howling machine-gun panic to trembling paranoia like it’s trying to keep its head above water, its struggles forming a tight, self-sustaining three minutes prototypical of later songs like “Surprise, Honeycomb.” On a less frantic note, “Grey Complexion,” sounding like a minimalist Smashing Pumpkins, wanders in and out of a dreamily aggressive guitar riff weirdly reminiscent of the dungeon music from the 1986 “Legend of Zelda”; and “From His Lips,” atypically unfettered by fuzz, redeems its awkwardly sardonic ledge-jumper lyrics (which include a poor enunciation of the phrase “clear tourist”) with a slowly degenerating churn that eventually trails off into a single metallic guitar.

Silver isn’t a great album—it isn’t a particularly good one—but finding the spikes of clarity amongst the homogenous tumult is akin to watching a chick peck its way out of an egg, especially now we know the little bird’s destined for great things. Secaucus is a shivery, unduplicatable exultation of an album, and The Meadowlands a rich work of exhausted triumph, but the seeds of both can be found in the Wrens’ debut, and they remind us that, though we’re entitled to wait for the masterpieces, we’d do well to at least pay attention to impenetrable messes.

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