voila_la_scorie
My friend came up to me one morning and asked me if I knew about Wolfmother. No, I did not. What? I hadn't heard about Woldmother? Apparently, until the night before, he hadn't either. So he let me listen to a few snippets of tunes on his iPod. Yup. Sounds good. Sure. Another hard rock band I should be into, eh? Uh-huh.
Then I heard the guitar riff for 'Sundial'. What the heck was that? That's effing cool. So, I ordered the delux-edition of the album, hoping for lots of Sundial riffs. What I got wasn't disappointing at all.
I gave CD 1 a spin in my car while driving and when it was done it spun a second time before CD 2 went in for a double run through. The album ended up on my MD player as well (that was before I had an iPhone) and stayed in it for two weeks before the debut album took over. What can I say? I love the music.
Only a couple of months prior I was thinking that music these days has stagnated (that was before I discovered the Prog Archives). Once there was a time when you could date a song to the year just by the sound and style. Now 2009 sounds almost like 1999. I gave up hope and spent most of my time in my 1968 to 1978 music collection. Wolfmother not only revive that sound and style of composing and playing but give it a shot to wake up the dead rock stars of the classic days of hard rock and metal.
What I particularly like about this second album is the appearance of some mother heavy riffs that would leave Tony Iommi wondering what he hadn't smoked to think of them. The riff and sound is so heavy sometimes it seems even the distortion is weighed down and sluggish, and an image of a glacier bulldozing it's way into downtown comes to mind.
But it's not all about knocking you senseless on your ass with heavy riffs. There's plenty of straight out hard rock and ease back acoustic and piano in the very best of the classic sense. For a band whose front man talks about a rock show that's just "bang, bang, bang, bang," one song after another (see their web site for the interview with Andrew Stockdale), they put a lot of effort into creativity and mood. The album is a rich menu of flavours.
One other thing I appreciate on this album is that there is less of a Jack White vocal style (though still prominent in some songs) than on their first album. At times I find myself thinking that Stockdale's vocals resemble a young Ozzy in tone but with power coming closer to (but not equivalent to) a young Robert Plant.
Overall, this album is a high four stars for me. I read somewhere that this is stoner metal but it's categorized as hard rock here on MMA. Whatever the case, if you want to hear what Led Zeppelin and Black Sabbath might have sounded like doing a collaboration, then here is something that's pretty close in my opinion.