WOLFMOTHER
Terminal 5, New York City
8 November, 2009BY ANDREW STAFFORD
Sometimes, it helps not to know too much. In my long experience in music, nothing quite equals the impact of seeing a band live for the first time – especially when it’s by accident. So, having missed out on tickets to the E Street Band at Madison Square Garden two nights ago, I instead found myself a curious spectator at the cavernous Terminal 5, watching Wolfmother entirely on spec in Hell’s Kitchen, New York City.
Of course, I’d heard all the scurrilous gossip, the bilious critical contempt, and the fact that their new album is called (cue giggles) "Cosmic Egg". But I’d heard not a note of the music, and had only a passing familiarity with their mega-huge first album.
After seeing them, I wonder if anyone else back home has really listened to them, either. Wolfmother, and frontman/godhead/dictator-in-chief Andrew Stockdale in particular, have copped a critical panning in their home country – for the afros; for the fantastical nonsense of the lyrics; for the blatant early ’70s dumbass tomfoolery of it all.
Yes, they are derivative. (What rock music isn’t these days?) It’s true: somehow, God or something hath wrought a singer who looks like Jim Morrison, sings like Robert Plant and put him out front of a band that sounds like Black Sabbath. How can it possibly fail?
It can’t, of course. The Yanks, of course, loved it. This is, after all, the kind of music their once-great nation used to regularly invade small Central American countries to. Whether that sounds like your thing or not, it cooks on stage.
Fact is, Wolfmother, and Stockdale especially, know how to put on a show. He pirouettes, does his funny little half duck-walk, and repeatedly raises his hands to the audience to elicit spontaneous displays of hollering hero-worship. It’s hilarious.
And the band rock. Now up to a four-piece, with a bizarre bass/keyboard abuser who attacks his instruments like the Muppets’ character Animal, Wolfmother sound bigger than ever. It’s also great to see Dave Atkins, of Australian hip-hop pioneers Resin Dogs, finally displaying his awesome drumming talents on the world stage.
It’s too easy, faced by a song title like "In the Forest of Gnomes" (which mercifully went unplayed) to ignore Wolfmother’s innate ability to have their lecherous way with one colossal riff after another. They’re particularly good at long, jammy breakdowns that go on just that little bit too long before slamming back into said colossal riff (say, the one from "Woman") at seemingly 10 times the volume. It’s an old trick, but hell, it still works a treat.
I get a bit worried when Stockdale says they’re “gonna get all dark and mysterious” on us – it may have been for the slightly ponderous "White Unicorn" – but really it’s a laugh. You couldn’t possibly get a band less mysterious than Wolfmother, something I’m sure Stockdale knows. Everything about them is so in your face, so obvious, that resistance is entirely useless.
It’s the Australian tradition to all but ignore local artistic achievement until it’s been validated by the tastemakers in London and New York, but I get the feeling that, like some pre-stingray Steve Irwin, we’re a little embarrassed about Wolfmother’s success. Ditto Jet, who played here the previous night. Some might call this a sign of growing critical maturity. I call it outright snobbery.
There will always be a young and hungry audience for this stuff, and Wolfmother carry it off with righteous zeal. Besides, Led Zeppelin and Black Sabbath were never a big hit with critics, either.
