Wolfmother 2006
On the cusp of something big…
“The wolf changes his coat, but not his disposition.”
I remember an uncle of mine once gave me two pairs of pants that didn’t fit him, hadn’t fit him for years. They were tight corduroy trousers with sailboat flares at the bottom, a blue and red tartan design and not quite enough spandex around the crotch. You felt like a sumo wrestler wearing them, with your balls compressed up into your body. Fashion moves in loops and cycles, and so, it appears, does music.
Right now we’re in a strange Donnie Darko anomaly where a portal to the seventies has opened up and these self-conscious, self-reflexive bands have poured out from the distant future, which is really the past (1972 or so, to be precise). It all started for us in Australia with Jet. For you recipe-keepers, that’s about two teaspoons The Beatles, one heaped tablespoon of Thin Lizzy and a muted dusting of The Rolling Stones. Right now, the word on the street is that a quartet of boys (not men, boys) from Warrnambool with the unassuming but ironically auspicious name Airbourne just signed an eight-figure deal with Capitol/ EMI based on a handful of shows and next to nothing out of the studio already. If these guys came up twenty years from now and said they were channelling the deceased spirits of AC/DC, people would probably believe them.
Now, right this second I am listening to Black Sabbath’s Paranoid album. I’ve worn copies of this record right through…the needle melting through the grooves somewhere right after the third or fourth riff in ‘Hand of Doom’ from sheer repetitive listening. It is an eerie sound…right at the peak of the song, Ozzy is growling into the mic, the guitars are coming through you like howitzers, and the sound kind of slides away for an instant before the needle crashes into the felt below in a cacophony of white noise.
When I first talked to Wolfmother back in late 2004, they had just dropped their first EP in Australia. The band, Andrew Stockdale, Myles and Chris, had been jamming together since around 2000, and in late 2003 decided to actually congeal into a band called Wolfmother. When the band signed to Modular Records on July 2nd 2004, they had been playing live together for a mere three months. They then dropped their debut EP in September to confusedly gushing praise. On the one hand the critics wanted to write them off as derivative initially, but the recent successes of Jet caused a pause, a fumble in the collective music press conscience, and they overcompensated. Pav at Modular knew exactly what he was doing. The Stripes’ Elephant was still hot on the earwaves, and lo-fi was the buzzword, and Wolfmother definitely had that live sound on their EP, as Andrew explained then.
“We just recorded it ourselves first onto the computer on an old mixing desk. We just set up the mics. As much as production goes, it could just be like layering vocals or guitars, things like that. There’s definitely an art form to capturing the sound that we’ve created. I guess a kind of more commercially based recording would have put more microphones onto the drums and put more reverb on the vocals, you know, kind of polished it up and made it a bit more commercially viable and easy on the ear. But we wanted to keep it somewhere in between where it still has a nice assembly of sounds, it does sound produced, but it still seems personal and there’s a bit of a DIY vibe. We did a few recordings where we put extra microphones on everything and gave everything a single track and we would record it and were like, this is disgusting. So we just put maybe two mics on the kit around the room and got this loose psychedelic vibe and let the sound of the kit sit pretty low in the mix.”
Of course, the EP sounded not too unlike a long lost demo tape from the Paranoid sessions that was intermittently infused with John Paul Jones Hammond lines. Onstage, the guys in the band were quickly making a name for themselves. Partly because of Andrew’s powerful falsetto that seemed like a younger, cloned version of Ozzy, partly because playing those old power chords at ten on the dial just makes you smile, and partly because the flood gates that the Stripes and Jet had opened were still frothing. Back in 2004, Andrew was dealing with round one of ‘is your music Sabbath-esque or Sabbath?’ rather well. “If it is similar to Sabbath,” he said, “that’s fine. Similarties are fine…I guess at the end of the day you’ve got to look at it and think, do I like the song? Do I react to it, and if it does then it’s a good song. As for the references, yeah, they are there and they exist, but I think this has been going on since the beginning of time.”
More recently all I got was, “I guess it has the feeling of those old recordings.” Interestingly, ironically, he lists a haberdashery of eighties superpop bands as his biggest influences now, including Vanilla Ice, Genesis and Phil Collins. LA Woman was and is another great influence on the band. Andrew was hoping to emulate the sound on that album before Wolfmother entered the studio to record their first one. “I’ve been listening to that since I was about twelve and I still love it. I think Jim Morrison really let go of all this stuff. Maybe at the start he was really worried about being an aloof young stud, but in LA Woman he really sounded like a real man. A man of substance. There’s a lot of substance and poetry and the band was really tight. I love the vibe of that, I’d love to capture that kind of sound. I think we do have the potential to open up musically and pull things back into an open sort of groove.”
And a lot of people would say that Wolfmother, at least on stage, are approaching that level of game. Hell, I always knew they would be huge, live jams or not. It’s just such a good sound to have rushing in your ears…and after years and years of mediocrity on the rock scene, my countrymen and I will gladly welcome with wide arms somebody that can make a 1973 sound live in stereophonic sound. So I find myself at the Prince of Wales on a cold August Saturday night with Ben Watkins from Warped leaning in my ear telling me how these kids on stage are the best damned thing he has ever seen, ‘…real rock and roll, man, do you understand me?” he stutters before air-guitar dancing across the floor.
Andrew is playing a Gibson SG onstage, through a Moody valve amp and a Roland jazz amp. Myles has this old 1960s jazz drum kit that he rattles the shit out of, and Chris is playing a Hammond stage organ through a Vox amp. They’re getting a great sound from all that vintage gear…and to those in the know, you can’t emulate that any other way.
In 2004 the band toured constantly, recorded a live set for Robbie Buck’s Home and Hosed show on JJJ, was invited to the Meredith Festival and generally picked up momentum. A brief tour overseas solidified their reputation there and back home. Nothing like respect overseas to tall poppy an Australian band. NME called them the “…new kings of the stoner age.” Rock Sound called them “Passionate and slightly barmy.” After Meredith they played Big Day Out to a receptive crowd, the Bandstand Festival in Japan and by April of 2005 they were back on the road in Australia, this time with an international reputation behind them and a hell of a lot more experience than their virgin shows a year earlier.
In June, 2005 Wolfmother went to Los Angeles to record their debut LP with producer D Sardy (Dandy Warhols, Jet, Hot Hot Heat, Oasis…). “The producer was great. He was a really good guy as a producer and a friend. He worked us hard and made the best that he could out of the songs. He really helped us push ourselves. I couldn’t listen to Joker and the Thief sixteen times in three hours and mix things and do things and change it around. Being a producer he had that objective ability.
“At the start, we just tried to make the songs better,” says Andrew on the rearrangements of several songs off the now familiar debut EP on the album. “We figured that some of the arrangements were done at the last minute so that we could play them live. We had never really listened to them as recordings. When we listened to it recorded, certain bits sounded too long and certain bits, we weren’t that satisfied with. We had time this time to rethink how the songs went together. We tried to capture a live performance and the energy of a live performance. We tried to capture that into the recording so it doesn’t have that sterile feeling. I can only hope it goes well now, because it’s out of my control now. We did the record and we played the shows and the rest is out of our hands. I just hope for the best.”
Andrew seems pretty confident that the album, which dropped on October 30th last year after the first single, ‘Mind’s Eye’, hit the street on the 17th of the same month, will fare well in the US upon its release there on May 2nd (April 24th in the UK). Their Dimensions EP featuring a smattering of tracks from the new album and two videos dropped in the US in the last days of January this year, but hasn’t hit the charts in America at writing. Triple J’s hottest 100 list contains six Wolfmother tracks, which is a record for the series, and a fairly reliable barometer of the WM temperature these days. “America loves their rock. It’s a rock country. In a sense we’ve drawn from that whole style of music. They are always looking for a rock band, and I think we should be embraced wholeheartedly and assuredly. It’s an honour to have this opportunity. It’s the kind of thing you just have to follow and enjoy while it happens. These kind of things don’t happen everyday. You could get scared if you were worried it wasn’t going to happen, but if it does we’re going to enjoy it.”
Wolfmother, the band’s eponymous debut album, is a sprawling album that takes in everything the band has learned thus far about music and themselves. There are brief moments when they move away from that Sabbath-drenched sound, often landing right in John Kay’s lap. Damn, there’s a section of ‘Mind’s Eye’ right in the middle where this ‘Magic Carpet Ride’ cum ‘Day in the Life’ transition buzzes and gurgles, a mêlée of flashbacks and feedback, and I’m equally impressed that they pull it off with aplomb, and that they get away with it. For those of you familiar with the EP, then I don’t need to say too much about the album. You’ll recognize some fairly comprehensive rewrites on some of the songs (see Andrew’s response above), that actually seem to improve them. For instance, ‘Dimension’ has been syncopated in terms of where the opening section lies and how the bridge works, because what was a weaker opening has been shifted to the middle of the song where it works much better. The real question though, is whether all this self-reflexive belly-button gazing sort of songwriting is a sign of perfectionism, or just a dearth of new ideas. How far can this band push the retro thing without folding in on itself? That goes for most of their peers as well. And after all, like Andrew said, people just want good songs. They don’t give a shit if they’ve heard something sort of like it on one of their parents’ records. You can only be derivative if people know what came before. That’s why those emperors were so keen to burn books, to erase the past is to clothe the emperor. Right now record companies are biting the bit for the past to slip into anonymity so that they can get on with the business of pushing out the same albums again as reprints, in cover albums and ‘derivative’ bands. They know the score.
But as derivative as Wolfmother seem to be, hindsight is 20/20. You could probably rock up on a desert island where two men have lived their entire lives, in total isolation from any other semblance of humanity, and get them to hum a tune, and odds are, if you’re a music fan you could relate it back to something you’ve already heard somewhere. As Will Self illustrated in one of his ‘Junk Mail’ cartoons where the woman says to the man, “You remind me of about 40 people I know.”
Their last American tour was much more of a promo affair, whereas the dates they have lined up in America over the coming months are intended to really drive home the album release and give a lot more people in the US a chance to catch the guys’ live show in full bloom. They will be playing eighteen shows in the US and UK until the end of April, fulminating in an appearance at the Coachella festival in Indio, California.
I was talking to Myles a few weeks ago about how the band learned to record their sound checks while on tour in the US, as it is one of the only chances to actually get anything on tape, and a lot of cool stuff happens then when the pressure is off, stuff that can bloom into useable riffs and chord changes down the road. By now, they will be getting used to the brutal regimen of touring. “Sometimes I just call myself on the mobile and hum a little melody and leave a message for myself and put it on the guitar later,” says Andrew on the subject. “We talk about stuff after shows as well. We’ll say, you know that jam that we did in Woman, what if we took that chord and tried it out. I brought along my little tape deck in America and started recording the sound checks.”
There aren’t many albums that stand up to what I like to think is the ultimate test of quality, repeated listens. I mean, people talk about desert island albums and one feels that they may be taking the whole thing a little too lightly. Because if you’re going to really have to live with three albums forever, with no other entertainment, you need to be careful. When I was writing about Wolfmother a year and a half ago I was thinking that based on Wolfmother’s EP of the time, their album might make it into my top ten or twenty ‘desert island’ albums. Now that the album has been out for a few months, I know for sure it would not make it into my top three desert island albums. It’s a great album, and would probably just skim into a top thirty or so…but there is no way it is going to edge out It Still Moves, My Favorite Things, Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony…or Master of Puppets for that matter.
Wolfmother are pitched on the zenith of the decision pyramid right now in a lot of minds. They could go either way in the coming months.
On the one hand, they could get big in Australia…tour their asses off, keep releasing albums and hope for half the respect and twice the profits of You Am I. On the other, they could get an iPod ad in America, hit the charts there and go to ridiculously accoutered parties in Hollywood where the coke mirrors are shivering sixteen-year olds, and the swimming pool is full of…well, why ruin that now. Let’s just wait and see.
- Blunt Magazine
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