BIG BAD WOLVES
It would be easier to locate a living veteran of the American Civil War than to find an article about hard-rocking Australian trio Wolfmother that didn't mention either their clear debt to classic rock bands like Black Sabbath and Led Zeppelin, or their big, fabulous hair.
Wolfmother's eponymous debut, recorded in Los Angeles but released in the U.S. six months after it stormed the charts in their homeland, is a smoldering collection of bone-crushing riffs, Ozzy-esque shrieking and enough Tolkien-speak to make a Dungeons & Dragons fan renounce Rush forever. "Woman" alone packs so much classic rock into its muscular frame, it's almost impossible to believe it's less than three minutes long. Plus, there's a cowbell! "Love Train," fortunately, isn't a ham-fisted cover of the classic O'Jays tune, nor is it a wretched hippie campfire song. When Wolfmother sing about a "Love Train," it's young, dumb and full of come-hither suggestiveness; it also fully and authoritatively rocks.
Perhaps just to prove they can, Wolfmother close their debut with a semi-acoustic number (at least for the first minute or so) called "Vagabond," which serves both as a display of their sensitive side and a neat summary of their modus operandi, including advising an unnamed girl to go look into a sorcerer's ball, presumably to decipher the rest of the song's cryptic lyrics.
If all there was to Wolfmother was the retro-sludge, the mystic cover art by legendary sci-fi artist Frank Frazetta and the faint whiff of stale bongwater, there wouldn't be much hope for their future. But if Andrew Stockdale's often-majestic voice doesn't make one immediately forget the brilliance of the late Jeff Buckley, it should certainly please those who found Coldplay's Chris Martin's mimicry adept, but ultimately flaccid.
Visually, Wolfmother come off like charmingly accented extras from an episode of That '70s Show: They're shaggy, wear vintage shirts and dirty blue jeans, look smelly and are worryingly svelte. Whether they're too young to buy beer is immaterial, because they also look savvy enough to pull off an obviously fake I.D.
It all comes together when they perform live. Stockdale's wild afro becomes the band's fourth member, taking on a life of its own. Drummer Myles Heskett is a fury of fists and elbows, and bassist/keyboard player Chris Ross spends as much time trying to get out from beneath his instruments as he does actually playing them. Not for the faint of heart, bearing witness to Wolfmother's live show is like trying to outrun a locomotive.