This is interesting I loved Bad Flowers a band that stormed onto the scene in early 2018 with ‘Staring Gun’ of which I said “(this is a) band that has a real Blues-Rock edge to their sound but yet brings their own personality to the table too. Lead single ‘Thunder Child’ opens proceedings and really does manage to capture the style, and there’s an immediate and obvious reverence for the greats of the past. But there’s more and on display is the craft of a band that draw their classic rock influences from a broad field and add a dash of Southern (USA) grit into the mix in equal measure to more contemporary influences.” Well now the band is rechristened Wolf Jaw and they sound well, different… Tom Leighton, Dale Tonks and Karl Selickis it seems “needed to evolve…to become something bigger.”
To be honest this new incarnation is something a lover of the same guys under their old name might need to consider, there are elements of the old but it really is a different beast. This band is all rather angry, rather dark, all rather hard-hitting and all rather one paced, gone is the subtlety of Bad Flowers to create a rather grungy take on QOTSA (a band I really never connected with at all). Indeed after the first few plays I must admit I didn’t really know what to say, I tried to put Bad Flowers out of my mind but I couldn’t help wonder why the dramatic change, why the sacrifice of touch for power?
Who knows? Let’s just say this one is all rather ferocious from the almost Iggy/Punk tinged thrust of opener ‘Hear Me’ to the janglier and admittedly lighter QOTSA meets Arthur Brown closer ‘Living the Dream.’ It’s almost as if someone has told them what they were doing isn’t cool as it could be and they need to gain an ‘Alt’ edge to get some credibility. Don’t get me wrong this isn’t a song or a bad album at all and I’m sure many searching for a little cool will love ‘I Ain’t Ready which does take on a Crobot meets Rival Sons-like groover with a darker edge. And it’s that retention of an underlying Bluesy groove that makes this one of my top picks.
The rest of the album as I said is all rather hard, heavy and full of rage, like ‘Ticking Time Bomb,’ ‘Beast’ and ‘The Fighter’ which bludgeon you into submission rather than coax you towards giving in. The tracks though that make you think this change of identity might work are ‘Piece of Me’ which takes me back to the early to mid-eighties Alt Rock sonically and ‘Open Your Eyes’ a song which just builds magnificently and actually feels to me like the sound of a more natural Bad Flowers evolution.
Sounds more like a restart to me than an evolution?
