Evil Dr. Smith: We had to wait for this a couple of years – it’s not something that happens every year, not even every decade – but now it’s time again. With proud I may announce another addition in the canon of essential Dutch Rock Albums. After Cuby’s ‘Groeten Uit Grolloo’, Outsiders’ ‘CQ’, Shocking Blue’s ‘At Home’, Earring’s ‘Golden Earring’ and ‘Moontan’, ‘Focus At The Rainbow’, ‘Vandenberg’, UDS’s ‘Mental Floss For The Globe’ and Within Temptation’s ‘Mother Earth’ I present to you: ‘Strange Fruits And Undiscovered Plants’ by DeWolff! It’s the tenth already legendary album that will shock the Dutch Rock History and simply screams for international recognition and success. These young and wild wolves from the South of Holland (Geleen, Limburg) proved to be extraordinary talented with their awesome ass-kicking EP from last year, and now they kick even more ass on their first full length. Excuse my language, but god damn: what a fucking masterpiece!
What do you need to create a historic masterpiece? Well, not much actually. You take a drummer (Luka van der Poel) that knows how to get the maximum results from a freakingly simple looking drum kit. Then we have a Hammond organist (Robin Piso) that is able to destroy his instrument like Jon Lord in his best Speed King-days, but can also play with subtle nuances or hip-swinging tension like Procol Harum or Booker T & The MGs. Third is a singing guitarist (Luka’s older brother Pablo) with a timbre that holds between Jim Morrison and Roger Waters and a ingenious talent for enslaving riffs. Why this band is better than all those thousands of other bands is the magical feeling for authenticity wrapped in superb melodies. The songs are extremely catchy, without the obviously influences becoming annoying, nor taking the easy road composing-wise. DeWolff isn’t the hardest, nor the most adventurous, most experimental or technical band in Holland, but it’s simply the songs, the atmosphere and the flow of the album (also on vinyl!) that makes them irresistible.
DeWolff turns back time forty years, but does this with such exciting and authentic flair that it doesn’t sound obsolete, but old fashionably good. Just like their EP, their material truly can compete with the legendary icons in the rock history like Led Zeppelin, Deep Purple, Jimi Hendrix and especially Cream, The Doors and Pink Floyd. They hardly recycled the songs from their EP for this album. The only song that they reused, is ‘Wicked Moon’ (its lyrics contains the album title), which was released as a live version on the vinyl version of the EP (which got four extra live songs). The rest of the album is brand new, like the grooving spacerock-pounder ‘Mountain’, the beautiful acid (blues)rock ballad ‘Medicine’, the redneck-ish slide in the pelvis-crusher ‘Don’t You Go Up The Sky’ (Cream meets Allman Brothers Band?), the pure heavy psych of ‘Fire Fills The Sky’ (the fat riffs simply scream for fifteen minute-long jam explosions on stage) or the lovely organ breaks in ‘Desert Night’ where Jim Morrison sings with Uriah Heep.
The influences are most obvious in the first part of ‘Birth Of The Ninth Sun’ (which starts with a piano for a change, although a lot of Hammond eruptions catch up), a dreamy-like, atmospheric song that would have make ‘Wish You Were Here’ even better if Roger Waters wrote it 35 years ago. Even the voice is almost the same. Excruciatingly beautiful, but halfway the song the tone becomes slowly more haunting and eventually develops into a raging psychedelic whirlwind with infernal declamations as if Pablo the new Arthur ‘I am the God of hell fire’ Brown. Another highlight is the surprising guest appearance from a saxophonist in ‘Red Sparks Of The Morning Dusk’: don’t expect arty-farty jazz, funky Blow Horns or experimental squeals like John Zorn’s Naked City, but the saxophone simply rocks here! There were only two trivial elements on the album that I was not crazy about, which are Pablo’s falsetto voice in ‘Parloscope’ and the way DeWolff closes the album with the short ‘Leather God’. After the fabulous monster epic ‘Silver Lovemachine’ (the title suggests an aptly mash-up from Hawkwind’s ‘Silver Machine’ and Arctic Monkey’s version of ‘Love Machine’) it might be a suitable cooling down to close the album, but it’s a rather simple thingy and misses the brilliance of the other songs.
The band recorded the album last summer in the Art Sound Studio in Belgium, between countless gigs on summer festivals, and did this on analogue tapes. Yes, analogue. When you’re aware of the age of these kids, their dedication for the late 60s-early 70s sound will become even more astonishing. To pimp the sound to present day standards, they exported the bunch to Fred Kevorkian (known for his jobs for White Stripes, U2, Iggy Pop and countless other amateurs), who mastered the music in the famous Avatar Studios in New York. The sound is slightly less raw than the EP and Pablo is singing with a more “American” style, but that’s only an advantage for winning the Buma Stemra Export Price 2010. Album of the year?
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