Title: “My tangerine dream”
Format: Album track
Written by: Andrew Stockdale
Performed by: Wolfmother
Genre: Hard rock
Taken from: New Crown
Year: 2014
Acclaim: n/a
I for some reason always assumed Wolfmother were a metal band – well, they sound like it, don't they? But apparently they're not. And that's all I know about them. Reading up, I see they've been compared to the greats like Zep and Sabbath, and now I look, I see the tag Heavy Metal is present, so maybe they are. Who knows? This is, as if you couldn't guess, my first experience of this band, so let's see what they have. I've chosen the track above more or less at random, as indeed the album has been chosen arbitrarily, although the veiled reference to Chris Franke's seminal psych/prog band of the seventies did, I admit, swing my choice a little.
Well that certainly sounds very seventies, the guitar kind of fuzzy, and even the vocal is quite Ozzyesque, so I can see the comparisons to Sabbath being somewhat valid, as well as those to the sort of Robert you put in a pot and water to see him grow. Kind of laidback in its way, with the guitar screeching riffs here and there, then a nice solo before the vocal comes back in. Perhaps a little bland, but not bad. Like the guitar buildup in around the fourth minute. Oh wait, it's stopped completely and now here's an acoustic, slow guitar with phased effects (?) and a much different vocal, almost like the late great Johnny Cash. Weird. But good.
Things I like about this :
1. Guitar is good, powerful without taking over too much
2. Vocal is a little derivative but engaging
3. Acoustic guitar at the end is nice and unexpected
Things I don't like about this:
1. The Johnny Cash vocal at the end does not work for me
2. The constant stabs of riffs after each “My tangerine dream” kind of irritates me
3. The reprise is kind of pointless really.
Rating: 