Now this is music perfectly suited to the critical chestnut “heavy as fuck.” The Australian trio Wolfmother gets their Led Zep on (among others) with this slab of ’70s-flavored rock that harkens back to the days when FM radio had serious balls, attitude to burn, and seven-minute opuses about wizards and faeries. Vocalist Andrew Stockdale, bassist/organist Chris Ross, and drummer Myles Heskett are unabashed in their theft of theatrical, arena-dominating rock, which conjures vivid images of lava lamps, tie-dyed tees, and mind-bending substances; Wolfmother should come shrink-wrapped with a hash pipe, were the concise, razor-sharp tunes not nearly as potent as they are. Stockdale’s libidinous howl that opens both the album echoes the sex-drenched vocals of Robert Plant, Roger Daltrey, Ozzy Osbourne, and countless other leather-panted frontmen who’ve anchored similar runaway freight trains. After kick starting the surprisingly expansive record with “Dimension,” the threesome rarely pauses for breath, crashing into “Woman” which collapses into “Witchcraft”—these guys slow it down somewhat with “Love Train,” but Ross’s cranium-cracking bassline threading through the sticky slow jam won’t dim the lights so much as shatter ‘em. Straight-ahead, no frills rock is drifting back into vogue and seeing as the fellas aren’t from around here, it goes without saying that Wolfmother arrives on our shores having generated a mountain of hype as massive as Ayers Rock; it’s with some relief that Wolfmother holds up and as we near the year’s halfway point, stands as one of the stronger debuts of 2006.
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