If I was in the hunt for a new favourite band this week and scribbling out reviews with one eye on the advertising potential for certain news-stand musical publications and the other on how I could conceivably wrap this write up in one nifty catchy line without actually having hearing the record – no names but you know who you are – this week’s honorary award for saviours of the great lost guitar wielding indie kids with floppy fringes cause would undoubtedly go to Dead Wolf Club.
Pressed upon 10 inches of heavy duty wax – coloured at that in green and white and featuring a by all accounts tasty fanzine – the ’Healer’ EP is about to break cover via the Big Tea imprint. An absolute drop dead gorgeous 4 track epic which I’m suspecting a younger former self would have greeted with all the festooning of bunting and pulse racing euphoria as though it was the last ever record before the end.
Heady words you might say, but I’ll fire back that there’s something here that fuses the angular, the atonal, the schizoid, the blissful and the edgy into a brittle teen spirited pop persona and draws upon the essences of a well heeled record collection as though a grab bagging mix tape, yet amid all this rigidly retaining their own identity and sound. As said 4 tracks lurk within, opening salvo ‘Flood’ hitting the ground running and having us scurrying for comparisons with the mighty th’ Faith healers and quick space albeit colluding together to concoct a bastardised mash out of old Pixies sound parts and possessed of a disquieting rumble that’s prone to snowburst into euphoric flurries of bliss rupturing feedback skree all sumptuously cast adrift amid a wiring armoury of punctuated volatile struts.
The hollowing and harrowing ‘Metropolis’ is classic Fiction-era Cure before the mascara and big hair, brooding, forlorn and coiled to an austere bleaching all beset by a synth back-dropping majesty you’d be hard pushed to hear better outside of a Chameleons platter. Traversing a similar generic ley-line ‘Melt’ emotionally fractures from withdrawn to an effervescent bruising in the blink of an eye amid the jarring spectral riffage a spiked heads down no nonsense attrition looms to the surface garnished in icy post punk signatures trimmed in an austere framing and cooled by the appearance of swooning fuzzed twang sighs. ‘17’ rounds up the set catching the vapour trail left by the wilde club collective and shoehorning between its finite grooving some stratospheric scorching a la early Ride and Moose that translates seductively into adrenaline charged halos of bliss kissed rapture. Goes without saying we want one of these cuties doing damage on our hi-fi – what of it then press people?
[Rating:4]
