Wolfmother - Wolfmother

It must be difficult to be Wolfmother. They’re loved by many (and criticised by some) for their strain of any-bigger-and-it’d-be-Spinal Tap rock. They were the target of a mammoth amount of attention from a variety of labels. They signed the biggest deal since Jet. That’s enough to get the self-doubt kick-started, surely?

Add to that the fact that the Sydney three piece’s self-titled debut was recorded in Los Angeles at the same sort of estimable recording establishments that’ve birthed such albums as Nirvana’s Nevermind and Fleetwood Mac’s Rumours, and you’ve got a real recipe for pressure. Wolfmother is, undoubtedly, one of the most anticipated albums of the past couple of years: so much so that you can hear both pants being wet and knives being sharpened in advance.

So how do the band perform under pressure? It’s simple. They release a disc that sounds like a distillation of all the cool stuff in your dad’s record collection, and then wrap it in artwork which recalls Boris Vallejo, and looks like it should be airbrushed onto the side of a shaggin’ wagon. In other words, they succeed in creating a monstrous rocker; so much so that it’s difficult to tell whether this is an amazingly honest album, or a fantastically realised foray into the world of tongue-in-cheek. It’s more stoner rock than had been expected, but it’s certainly nowhere near the remake of Paranoid that the band’s critics had predicted.

What’s changed since the band’s initial EP and run of contract-attracting shows is their playing. The band sounds a lot tighter. They’re playing with a lot more abandon, particularly Chris Ross, who can be heard (particularly on Dimension) giving his bass the absolute thrashing that this kind of music needs. Vocalist and guitarist Andrew Stockdale is more at home unleashing his PlantmeetsOsbourne pipes a little more than before (witness the theremin-aping falsetto work on Pyramid, a song that’s often fallen down live, but here is strong and assured) while drummer Myles Heskett appears to be a little more leadwristed than before.

Undoubtedly, this is what comes from their solid gigging at festivals across Australia and the world, but it’s nice to hear a recording – produced by D. Sardy, who’s pulled serviceable sounds from the most truculent bands, including Jet and Oasis, amongst others – where the concept of a live performance isn’t lost. Wolfmother is, first and foremost, a live band; one where the stage rendition of songs has almost always outclassed the recorded version. Wolfmother goes some way towards redressing that balance.

On the album, the band sound like they’re performing together, in a big room, which is exactly what the material needs. You can hear Stockdale’s calls to his band members, his urgings and enthusiasms, and it makes the album a much more personal experience. Which is, let’s face it, important, because as big and dumb as rock can get, there’s still a need for some kind of connection.

Album opener Colossal blows away the naysayers with a tune that – musically – is a lot closer to something like Kyuss than previously. Vocally, Jack White and Robert Plant are a bit more in evidence than Ozzy Osbourne, but it’s hard to deny that Stockdale does bear an intriguing resemblance in voice to the Black Sabbath singer. Musically, the tune thumps along in a slow groove – the sort that’ll have the listener making alarming chicken-peck head movements within moments – until its closing stages, where the throttle suddenly opens and the tune goes hell for leather before returning back to its doomy origins. It’s a bold starting statement, and serves to illustrate the level of high drama that’ll be experienced through the rest of the album, best conveyed in Joker & The Thief (which sounds a lot like a beefed-up version of The White Stripes, and possesses a solo that could’ve been ripped from King Crimson’s Red) and Where Eagles Have Been, which at once expresses the band’s trepidation at their predicament:

while managing to sound like a combination of Atom Heart Mother-era Pink Floyd, Led Zeppelin III-era Led Zeppelin, and Mike Oldfield at his most solo-heavy. Elsewhere, Vagabond manages to muster a freewheeling spirit, without the sacrifice of the cosmic feel that the band has worked hard to nurture.

Tales From The Forest Of Gnomes is probably the song that’ll earn the most comment, as it’s both the song that indulges the band’s hippie aesthetic most nakedly. It’s also, musically, a lot more subtle than some of the band’s other work. Certainly, LSD-taking moments of The Beatles are evoked – especially vocally – but so too is David Bowie and other more sword-and-sorcery albums as King Crimson’s In The Court Of The Crimson King. But, as ever, the band make dip into the genres, for inspiration, rather than slavishly aping. This – and the fact that the only mention of a gnome comes in the title of the tune, so there’s no Laughing Gnome-style groaners – is what saves the track from the eye-rolling that many listeners would meet it with, based on its title.

But as well as new songs, there are some revisitations. The best way to judge the effectiveness of the recording of the tunes on Wolfmother is to compare the ones that’ve been rerecorded from the band’s first EP. There are, as you’d expect, a couple of differences. Woman gains speed and a phenomenal bottom end, but somehow sacrifices the majesty it invoked on EP. It’s a bit more polished, and the organ sounds a little more steam powered than before, but the song comes very close to being just a touch too much.

Dimension is, again, a touch faster than on the EP, and feels a bit hurried. That said, there’s some moments where it’s slightly rearranged, and this works well, giving a little more of a sense of wildness to the performance. Likewise, Apple Tree benefits from the guitar-fuzz and increased vocal clowning of the album version, particularly during the Sabbath-invoking chorus section.

White Unicorn is the real winner in terms of makeover, though, as the long keyboard solo part – such a success live, and often, such a drag on record – has been greatly shortened. It makes for a much better tune, and shows that the band isn’t afraid to shed material when it’s not working properly.

The reworkings are a bit of a mixed bag, but generally positive, which is a big achievement when you consider exactly how well known the EP’s songs were by the time it became deleted.

(Production differences between the EP and album versions aside, it does leave a bit of a bad taste in the mouth to see the EP’s contents duplicated in full on the band’s first full-lengther. While the songs are good, it can leave the listener feeling a bit short-changed, especially when something like the live steamer Love Train is left out of the recording schedule.)

If there’s a weakness on the album, then it lies with the lyrics. Not so much with the subject matter – wizards, purple hazes and jokers and thieves are pretty standard in this style of music, and often display canny reference to other musicians and tunes – but more with the fact that there’s often a lapse into the house/mouse rhyme scheme. True, this aids the band’s songs in some ways – there’s undeniably an element of naïve wonder to the narrator in these songs – but it also can create artificial distance.

Still, this is early in the band’s career, and there’s plenty of time of lyrical development. Suffice to say that what’s here does fit in well with the album, but a little bit of expansion certainly wouldn’t hurt.

What Wolfmother have going for them, at heart, is the same thing that worked so well for Bjorn Borg – well, until he got hooked on cocaine and his fashion label. The answer? Niceness. The band – in interview and in person – exude such regularity, such down-to-earth passion about what they do that it’s difficult not to like them. It certainly makes it very difficult to find much that’s at fault with this album. That’s not to say that it’s life changing or somehow stunningly original – it’s not – but I don’t believe that the band have ever really claimed that their music is. If anything, they seem to have roots in the jam band neck of the woods: they know that they’re representing rather than inventing new languages, and so they don’t belabour the point saying that they are.

And while purists will be happier with their copies of Vincebus Eruptum on vinyl, those who aren’t so au fait with the finer points of ‘70s rock (or even those who are, but aren’t so precious about it) will dig Wolfmother in a big way. This album is, if you like, the distillation of what ‘70s rock of a certain (admittedly UK-centric) strain was all about. Yes, there’s wafts of gnomes and unicorns, and yes, the lyrics can sometimes be a bit twee. But you can’t fault – or hide – musical passion, particularly when it sounds as good as this does.

Whether one believes it’s more derivative than other stuff out there – the answer is no, it isn’t – this album will be the entry point to a whole world of music for a new generation. When those overly critical of the band suggest that they’re ripping off the past, they forget that there is a whole generation of people out there who aren’t necessarily as clued-up on particular styles of music as others might be. There’s whole swathes of music that’re considered old hat, or aren’t even known about by certain listeners until they’re represented in a vital or important way. It’s happened with country (cf: Johnny Cash’s latter albums of covers), it’s happened with disco (cf: Scissor Sisters), and it’s happened with glam (The Darkness). Now, it’s the turn of the bat’s head eaters and the unicorn riders.

This is where Wolfmother stand. Less at the dawning of an Aquarian age, and more at the opening of a chapter of distorted revivification. It’s not a bad place to be.

Of course, if you’re fluent in the language of Metal or Prog, you probably won’t need it. Hell, you’ll probably try to take the piss out of it. But if you’re not, you’ll probably find this is a brilliantly realised crib sheet for an entire movement. If you’re someone who thinks Ozzy Osbourne didn’t exist before reality TV, that believes that Slipknot are metal, or you’re someone for whom the ‘70s is considered to be about as distant as the Stone Age, you should really check out a copy of this disc. It will – as no doubt intended, given the hippie overtones of the album – truly open your mind to what’s out there.

And, to borrow a line from Bill And Ted’s Excellent Adventure, it’s excellent for dancing. Franz Ferdinand might have a lock on music for girls to dance to, but Wolfmother may just have created a great disc for girls and stoners to dance to.