reviews / 2006

GUITAR WOLF - Golden Black… The Best Of Guitar Wolf

Name: GUITAR WOLF – Golden Black... The Best Of Guitar Wolf
Item: Golden Black... The Best Of Guitar Wolf
Rating: 7
Author: Antonio Ciarletta

2006 (Must destroy music)

garage-punk

by Antonio Ciarletta

A cult band for quite a few American artists, from Jon Spencer to Lightning Bolt, just to name a couple, champions of a trashy, spastic garage-punk that blows past every limit of musical political correctness, Japan's Guitar Wolf arrive at a well-deserved anthology that traces much of their career.

An excellent collection, catering to anyone wanting to get acquainted with the band's sound, and one that closes the circle of celebrations kicked off by the 2004 tribute "I Love Guitar Wolf Very Much", featuring covers by artists of the caliber of J. Mascis and Jim O'Rourke among others, and continued with "Guitar Wolf-Live From The World"; not to mention, in between, the death of Billy Bass Wolf, felled by a heart attack right after wrapping up the 2005 world tour, which had sold out practically everywhere.

Descendants of Link Wray, the Cramps and the Sex Pistols, Guitar Wolf have nothing to envy from anyone when it comes to sloppiness and sheer nerve. Their garage-punk sounds like it was pieced together from scrap salvaged at a radioactive dump, not unlike the great Oblivians. Compared to the Memphis trio, though, Guitar Wolf push the surf'n'roll side even further, paring the primitivist blues elements down to the bone.

A torrential, saturated sound, built around extraordinarily effective anthems, with no real concessions to easy listening, and an imagery that evokes Bruce Lee and Japanese b-movies.

Having said that, there's little else to add, except that these twenty-six distorted spit-wads are a joy for the mind, prompted to shut down all its usual activity in order to decode their meaning (which isn't there...), and for the body, forced into a bedroom pogo dance well beyond any rational will to resist.

Be warned, though: Guitar Wolf are addictive.

Ride the wave of great music

Add OndaRock to your favorite sources on Google Discover. Don't miss our reviews, milestones and latest news straight in your feed.

Follow on Google

05/07/2006

Share on

This article is an English translation of the original Italian text by Antonio Ciarletta, published on OndaRock.it. It was translated with the help of artificial intelligence, under the editorial responsibility of OndaRock's editor-in-chief, Claudio Fabretti.

Read the original in Italian · About the English edition