6

Bland stoner rock with some nice moments.

Formed in 1995 from the ashes of the well-known rockers Trouble, it's taken Wet Animal over ten years to release their debut album, a ten-track offering of gloomy, yet paradoxically smile-inducing hard rock with some distinctly grungy riffs. It seems that in their ten year hiatus, Wet Animal failed to notice that musical fashions have changed somewhat. Even more suggestions that in Wet Animal land it's still the 20th century come in the distinctly Guns 'n' Roses like sound that's present throughout much of the album. The melodic, laid-back guitar playing sounds like G 'n' R's more mellow offerings, while Rick Wartell's drawled vocals are more than a little like Axel's.

The sounds on offer here are diverse, though. From the ominous, heavy riffage of 'Land Minds' (sadly not the only song title composed of a bad pun), a song which kicks off with what sounds like an air-raid siren, to the relaxing rock of 'Nomads Land' (yep, there's another one), a song redolent of lazy summers several decades before I was even born. The juxtaposition of a bongo'd intro with a repetative, but annoyingly catch guitar riff, all squeezed into three and a half minutes, ensures that 'Outside a Hole' is the perfect radio-friendly would-be single of the album. But almost every track here stands well on it's own, ensnaring the listener with a particular riff or vocal hook, before returning to becoming a pleasant enough, if easily ignored, background noise. The chief problem with this album, in my opinion, is that there are too few of the former moments, and too many of the latter. Almost every grooving intro (a particularly noteable example being 'Don't Put Me Down', which starts off as close as it's possible to be to Metallica's 'Enter Sandman' without infringing copyright) is followed by several minutes of inoffensive, but bland, stoner rock.

It's fairly easy to sum up the fundamental problem with 'Wet Animal' - it's quite frankly a bit dull. Every so often it threatens to become interesting, but then gradually sinks back into inoffensive mediocrity. Perhaps my ears have been corrupted by too much of the heavy stuff, or perhaps you actually do need to be a bong kisser to appreciate stoner rock. Either way, I found little on this debut to that really amazed or even interested me, and neither, I suspect, will you. Perhaps Trouble fans might want to pick this up to see what Wartell's been up to, but I can't really think of any other reason to buy this album. It's not especially bad, in fact it's rather pleasant at times, but it simply washed over me, leaving me struggling to recall much about it even after three or four listens.