I once read a review of Sigur Ros's "Agaetis Byrjun" album in which the reviewer, at wit's end trying to describe the band's unearthly sound, was compelled to simply serve up his scribbled one-sentence notes ("sings as if glittering cherubim were dangling from his testicles," "the sound of glaciers falling into the sea, only backwards," etc.) and call it good. Some art is like that; it leaves us feeling barely equipped to enjoy it, let alone articulate why it's good. With some bands, even ascribing influences to them seems like cheap guesswork.
Wolfmother is not one of those bands. One sentence is really all I'd need to explain them: "Wolfmother sound like 70s garage-rock on their verses, Black Sabbath on their choruses, and Hawkwind everywhere else, and Andrew Stockdale sings like Robert Plant on the first line of 'Black Dog'." That'd do if I was feeling lazy, and if I didn't like Wolfmother as much as I do.
Yes, they're unbelievably retro. Interscope could have billed "Wolfmother" as a long-lost album from 1971 and I would have believed it. The spectacularly-coiffed trio from Melbourne is a 70s stoner-rock band in the same way that the Darkness are an 80s hair-metal band. (That I like the Darkness slightly more than Wolfmother, while at the same time finding genuine 70s stoner-rock infinitely more satisfying than 80s hair-metal, is a paradox I'll save for my blog.) Aside from the influences already mentioned, the band seems determined to align themselves with "classics" of all stripes. Their website proudly trumpets that the band rehearsed at Cherokee studios, which "in its heyday hosted sessions like Pink Floyd's 'The Wall'," and that they recorded their album at Sound City, in the same room where "Nevermind" and "Rumours" were "incubated." The site even points out that the band shot videos in a patch of desert where the original "Star Trek" occasionally filmed. And look at the goddam album cover! Didn't that guy used to draw "Conan the Cimmerian?" Sheesh.
But again, if I didn't like them so much... If the chiming guitar on "White Unicorn" didn't give way to a thundering swamp-rock chorus, with Myles Heskett and Chris Ross beating hell out of their instruments while Stockdale wails "We can liiiiive to-geth-ah!" over the top. If "Where Eagles Have Been" didn't start out sounding like a pastoral "Physical Graffiti" B-side and then lift into stadium-filling hugeness. (See them in the clubs while you can, kids.) If "Colossal" didn't kick like a pissed-off mother kangaroo and lurch into Frankensteinian heaviness and then kick into a punky middle section and then slammajamma back into punchy splendor at the end. And, oh yeah, there's the bruising "Woman" (yes, the titles are hysterical, but I give my audience enough credit to realize that on their own) with its brilliant, boneheaded riffing and pummeling prog-rock middle section.
The colossus misses its aim once or twice; "Apple Tree" is aimless and annoying, aside from sounding like a White Stripes song with better drumming; the album loses steam in its later tracks (there's a flute solo at one point); and Stockdale's wizards-of-evermore lyrics make suspension-of-disbelief difficult by the time "Vagabond" runs its hurdy-gurdy course. ("Go and see the sorceror and look into the ball / And you will see the answer written on the wall" serves as Stockdale's closing pearl.)
But Wolfmother soar too high to be dragged down, and the twin titans of "Mind's Eye" and "Pyramid" are when they touch the sun. "Mind's Eye's" glorious acoustic opening sections, Stockdale's surprisingly tender singing, and the band's willingness to lay back and let the song unfold make the inevitable collapse into fuzz a fist-pumping celebration; and "Pyramid's" rumbling rhythms, cascading guitars and ray-gun solo (and the same boneheaded one-note riff as "Woman" but who cares) hit the ear like a junior varsity Black Sabbath, stripped of its dark power, to be sure, but imbued with a sunny indomitability that a band from Melbourne radiates more naturally than one from Birmingham. If Wolfmother had ended the album with "Pyramid" and left off "Apple Tree," "Wolfmother" would be as close to perfect as any album of its kind could be.
This is the kind of album that makes you look forward to the next one, because within this 70s stoner-rock trio there lurks a 21st century monster that wants out. I like this record a lot, but I'm hoping that next time Wolfmother will make it a little harder for me to find words to describe them. |