Roaming around the planet you notice that music from your own country couldn’t have been made in somebody else’s country – or planet. The Allman Brothers couldn’t have come from Liverpool, Echo And The Bunnymen couldn’t have come from Florida. Thanks for both of them at their best.
I’m in Austin and to Texan ears Wolf Alice might sound like a generic English Indie band whereas to me they stand out amongst generic English Indie bands. I’m not sure why as they have all the elements of the aforementioned stereotypical English group and I presume if you are from Birmingham and like Black Sabbath then you might feel the same way as a Texan about a group like this.
Planet Hunter is a track from their latest album Visions Of A Life, released late 2017, performed live and sonically realized in this awkward studio setting. I like the song, the sounds, the arrangement, the melody, the performance – I’m not in love with the words but I don’t hate them either, I suppose that’s often the weakest link. The title seems more interesting than the lyric and in the wake of fantasy writer Ursula Le Guin’s death earlier today, one might have expected a vivid fantasy. But then what can be expected from an Indie band from North London – they’d be laughed off Camden High Street if they wrote about dragons, Ursula Le Guin might not have much to say about London angst.
With so much information collected in the last few weeks travelling around America, it’s been hard to sit down and write about it, the people, the places, the record stores, the book stores, the music we’ve seen in Houston, Austin, New York and the multiple venues of New Orleans spewing out Blues and Jazz as we rushed down a freezing Frenchmen street, the shows we’ve played in Jackson, Mississippi, Tucson, Arizona and Houston, Texas. It’s all so rich, a literal honeymoon in America. So as we prepare to continue this fascinating journey with a dozen live shows in the next month, I find my musical head turning back to what I know, to where I’m from, and to one of the better Indie bands, Wolf Alice, not from Mississippi or Texas, Nevada or California, but from the only place that they could have been created – London, England.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wolf_Alice
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Visions_of_a_Life
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