Word to Your Wolfmother
When Wolfmother’s guitarist and lead squealer Andrew Stockdale promised a followup to 2009’s Cosmic Egg, few could’ve predicted how embattled its production would become. Amid all the murmurs and episodic updates, there was talk of a late 2011 release and then, with the album reportedly close to finished, a fashionably late publication in early 2012. Thereafter and for reasons unclear, axeman Aidan Nemeth and drummer Will Rockwell-Scott made an unceremonious exit— and with them, it would seem, our faith in a third Wolfmother album.
Stockdale found new blood right away, however, but this time with a caveat: Wolfmother would be shuttered, and the band’s unpublished third album, fussed with and retooled for the thousandth time, would be presented as a solo project instead. Well, now it’s finally here— and guess what? The exes did well to jam their glowing-red eject buttons and float to safety from this ever-roiling neutron bomb of purloined riffs and noodleheaded lyrics.
From the keyed-up boogie of opener “Long Way to Go” to the aggressive, flower power-tinged “Of the Earth,” singer Stockdale deals only in clichés, miming the choreography of Led Zeppelin, minus all the ambition or any sense of a personal touch. And I mean, any sense. The honkin’ guitar lines may hiss and grind, but don’t be fooled: Stockdale’s lyrics are so flat and—if you’ll pardon the play—so stock, that, upon hearing them, they don’t even conjure images in the listener’s mind. All you get is static—the static of hearing, rather than reading, what they call in the typographic community lorem ipsum, which is the placeholder text used in the planning stages of a page design. Of course, it’s supposed to be switched out with genuine copy before it hits the press, but I guess Stockdale forgot that step.
No rhyme here is unexpected and no reference hasn’t already been covered by another band with more wit or detail. “Year of the Dragon” speeds up Led Zeppelin’s classic hook to “How Many More Times,” only to offer yelps about the Chinese zodiac—dropping such gems as, “In the year of the rat / You gave me a welcome mat.” Ugh. On the title track, “Keep Moving,” Stockdale nicks, note for note, Rainbow’s guitar drone to “Stargazer.” Same tempo, same key, same everything, with the only difference being that Dio and Ritchie Blackmore wrote it first 40 years ago, their version had visionary lyrics, a truly indelible chorus and —oh, yeah—it fucking rocked.
One could go on and on about the insufferable “Let It Go” sounding conspicuously close to Deep Purple’s “Highway Star.” Or one could effuse about how, not stopping at sacking classic metal, Stockdale pickpockets glam legend Marc Bolan with “Black Swan”—which, despite the hand drums and hippie-dippie flourishes, isn’t at all a takeoff on “Ride a White Swan” (wink, wink). But, then again, work so suckingly vacuous barely deserves the scrutiny.
By the time this overlong nightmare winds to a close with the grubby, ersatz Jack White-isms of “Everyday Drone,” Stockdale empties his folkie heart of a few more clichés, and confides, “Now I’m just talking as a friend.” Well, Andrew, now I’m just talking as a friend: Please, for the love of those you rip off, take a creative writing course. As The Simpsons’ Comic Book Guy might say: “Worst. Album. Ever.”
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