La Dispute's “Wildlife,” the follow-up to their 2008 LP “Somewhere at the Bottom of the River Between Vega and Altair,” is a nearly 60-minute musical examination of the twenty-something search for purpose; an exploration of the struggles that confront, damage, and redefine us inevitably in life through 14 tracks of new material.
Set up as a collection of unpublished “short stories” complete with the author's notes and sectioned thematically by four monologues, “Wildlife” discusses the difficulties inherent in growing up by interweaving the author's own ambiguous loss and struggle for meaning alongside the stories it compelled him to document.