Ah, Patrick Wolf. He’s like an 80s' pineapple, wearing wayfarers, sporting some sort of gold lamé garment, with synth happiness just pouring out of him. Well pineapple no longer, this South London new romantic has gone rogue, morphed, transbogulated. Well that might be a bit extreme, but his new album Sundark and Riverlight is not the Patrick you’ve come to know.
Sundark and Riverlight marks Wolf’s ten years of making records. Defiantly stating “I'm going back to the studio and recording my jubilee record... The album will be totally, totally, totally stripped down. It's time for me to be retrospective about the last ten years before I move on to the next ten."
Really Patrick? Really? This album seems like a self-indulgent statement but no-one’s quite clear on what the message is. Wolf has taken some of our favourites from each of his previous albums and done what he promised – hugely stripped back tracks, no synths, not exactly totally acoustic but very close.
As the album title cleverly suggests this record is all about opposites. This is where things start getting deep. So we’ve get all sorts of opposing ying-yang conflicts entwined – light vs dark, happy vs sad, melancholic drama vs overarching optimism. On top of all that it’s like he’s showing some other side of himself musically. Before I start sounding like a twat, I’m in no way trying to explain what he’s doing, just trying to understand this odd composition.
So, for example, one of my favourites "Bermondsey Street" off the album Lupercalia. I don’t think he’s added anything to the song by stripping it of the flourish of the drum machine and adding increasing up-tempo crescendos.
On the other hand, take "The Libertine" a song that originally included some of Wolf’s signature synths and now, naked with just the Dickensian theatrics of the violin and marching drum - it’s transformed. I imagine running through Victorian London amongst the paupers and orphans, villains and vaudevilles, the rich and debauched chased by some maniacal Sherlock Holmes. But then"Vulture" comes on and I’m just plain sad.
I’m not saying it’s a bad album I just don’t understand the concept or more so the need. Some of the tracks really suit having new composition and less fanfare and are great to listen to. There’s a reason why we have kept buying his records for so long though and it’s not because of this.
Score: 6.5 out of 10
