Please experience Wolfmother

PRIOR to staying here in Australia for a few months, I have heard about this band from a colleague of mine a while back. Although he has mentioned about some of the sensibilities of this band,saying that this band rocked in an “old-school way” and that they were good, but I merely shrugged it off as one of the many unremarkable music groups found in this country. And now that I am here in the bands home country, I so often see some kind of  clues that this band is really that big here, which made me even more hesitant to listen to their music, learning from my point of view, the kind of “popular music” that are so ubiquitous in this country. Basing on all of these personal notions, I have made a conclusion that this band was “an alternative pop rock group sounding some kinda like Powderfinger or something” without really having a listen to them.

But then, nearing the end of my stay in this pop-infested, redundant radio airplay filled country, I happened to catch a music video of Wolfmother. (after a video of  Kylie Minogue, no less) And I have to say, in the most cliched possible way, I was pleasantly surprised. They did rock, and not just in a head-bobbin’ kind-of-way, but in a way that you rock to a Led Zeppelin song or to a sample from The Doors. Sure, this makes their sound really unoriginal, but it’s like they encapsulated the music from an era when psychedelic rock flourished, and dropped it in a glass of water that is the 21st century. And as the capsule dissolved, a lot of young people of today who never really knew what the music of the 70’s and 60’s were like, suddenly became aware that their father’s music was, in a sort of too-embarrassed-t0-admit attitude, was cool. Really cool.  

Coheed & Cambria and the Amory Wars

For you not in the know, all the songs released by Coheed and Cambria in all their four albums are the narration of a intergalactic battle known as the Amory Wars.I am not really into this Amory Wars comics, and I personally think that it’s too over the top and ridiculous at some point, (note: I have not read the whole series, I am basing my critique for the few pages that I have read and in the few essays I found in the net.)But I am impressed in the ability of Claudio Sanchez to use his song-writing skill to narrate a long epic, which was also written by himself. And also on his ability to make the song feel that you are damn involved in the actual epic. An example of this is ‘In Keeping Secrets of Silent Earth 3′ from the album of the same name, which really makes you feel that you are actually going into war. But some of the songs have a very different feel from what he is actually stating. Three Evils (Embodied in Love and Shadow) tells of ’severing limbs from the torso’ and pulling the trigger to stop the nightmare, yet it has a very upbeat kinda pop-rock feel into it. Overall, kudos to this band for pulling off 4 albums of full of theme songs for a storybook, and actually having listeners who stick  to the songs even though they don’t know shit about what it means. Very few bands can pull that off.