By Bernard Zuel, reviewer
Wolfmother (Universal)
Dumb is not of itself a bad thing. Like a netballer who can't spell her name but can see a gap in the defence before anyone else. Or a dancer who couldn't tell you which way a door opens but can touch you with his movement. Sometimes dumb is just another word for being unable to explain what comes naturally or instinctively.
And then sometimes dumb is exactly how it sounds: lacking real thought, responding by rote, abandoning imagination and continuing to do so long after signs of life have escaped.
For the purposes of this exercise, as I listen once again to the Wolfmother album, I can think of no better example than the money churning/fleecing conglomerate formerly known as the rock band Kiss. The make-up wearing, fire-breathing sons of New York had a career which, in its first decade, could be said to fit with our first definition of dumb (no brain but much simple atavistic pleasure) and since then has lived down to the second (no brain, no heart and no pleasure).
Now it can be said that Wolfmother have compressed that trajectory into two albums and Cosmic Egg could not be more aptly named. Wolfmother's new line-up, with singer-guitarist Andrew Stockdale the only original, have laid an egg of cosmic proportions.
Stockdale's rolling riffs, as in opener California Queen and the title track, are sludgy but lack Black Sabbath's escaping-the-working-class drive. Swing attempts, as in White Feather , make Led Zeppelin's clumsy funk on Houses of the Holy feel positively James Brown-like. The guitar heroics and quest for meatiness in Phoenix or New Moon Rising would have been eaten up and spat out by Buffalo. When they go misty eyed and kinda psychedelic, as in Far Away or Pilgrim , they have all the trippiness of Ernie Sigley.
Familiar tropes arranged without any attempt to explore even perfunctory variations, this is the sound of a '70s revival act who learnt the riffs but not the lessons, wore the clothes but not the style, bought the fondue set but got the cheese instead of the chocolate. This is the sound of a horse being flogged beyond even an Australian jockey's limits.
Dumb? Oh yeah, dumb as. In the dullest way.
© 2007 The Sydney Morning Herald
