Stop fannying about with emo and all that, get stuck into some Real Rock!
Each song takes you on a journey; it's fucking amazing. This is Rock, the return. Wolfmother are here to kick the stale ass of the harder side of music into touch. Forget post-hardcore, nu-metal, emo-punk, all these ill-conceived fashionable tags will buckle under the pressure that the mighty Wolfmother will enforce. This is the real deal, and it's been a long time coming, go tell Jimmy Page and Ozzy Osbourne that they can finally retire...
Opening their debut album with the powerfully pumping 'Dimension', it sets the precedent for what's to come, a cut of proper meaty music, rife with riffage, drenched in distortion and packed with pounding percussion. 'White Unicorn' ranks highly as one of the best songs released this year, its glorious epic and psychedelic verse transmutes into a chorus that is just something classic, an unbeatable record.
The third instalment is 'Woman', the conformation of this review's opening sentence, a song that takes you away, puts you in a place, doesn't leave you a trail of breadcrumbs to find your way back, and eventually comes get ya laughing its head off at ya. The middle of the song is populated with a repeating riff that seems to last forever and puts you into a trance, you get into it, then you start to wonder if somehow the CD's stuck, and then you stop wondering that and get more into it, and more into it, and more and then it stops and goes back into the song without a shrug...
'Apple Tree' is fairly punky compared to the rest and 'Joker and The Thief' pays ultimate homage to black Sabbath, beginning with a motif like 'Paranoid' being tapped on a guitar and run through a mangle. The album's almost too much of a hypnotic and euphoric experience to sit through, but its full of raucous punchy enjoyment and as the songs progress one by one you get off on that more and more.
'Mind's Eye' starts like something from Radiohead's back catalogue, it continues in the vein of Led Zeppelin and goes into an Emerson, Lake and Palmer style organ phrase, seriously, what more can you ask? Wolf-Moth-Er! Wolf-Moth-Er! Wolf-Moth-Er!
Here's a band that sound like they've either drawn all their inspiration from the 70s and recreated perfectly the attitude and ethos of rock in that era, or have never listened to that music before and come up with all this from scratch, because they sound like this is what they were born for, like the energy of rock music flows through their veins, like God said 'let there be Wolfmother.' Yeah!
'Pyramid' weaves a beautiful guitar tapestry with the same notes oooh-ed vocally over the top, it works splendidly and makes for an extraordinary aural sensation, and then when you think Wolfmother can't surprise you any more they throw in a miraculous flute solo, boosting the sound of 'Witchcraft' and giving it a smooth seventies espionage flick feel. Too groovy!
Wolfmother don't let up for a minute, their debut album is a non-stop barrage of glorious classic rock, this is fresh, this is hellishly infectious and this is Now. Coming to the band afresh you'd be forgiven to think that the album's a lost classic from the classic rock era, not because it sounds archaic, because it sounds like the greats, give it pride of place on your record shelf next to the Sabbath and the Led Zep, because it's deserving!