Let’s play a quick little game.
A Norwegian band named Wolves Like Us recorded an album titled Black Soul Choir. Without listening to it, and without knowing much about the band itself, try to come up with what the music sounds like. Ready? Go!
A tip: take those names at face value, and you’ll get damn close.
These riffs rattle bones, the melodies come from somewhere north of Valhalla, and the drums feel as though they are played by wooly mammoths on PCP. These tracks are for neither the faint of heart nor fans of something unexpected. They are for hard rock fans who like their rock hard, without any bullshit. Hard like a diamond, hard like a drill sergeant, hard like the heavy marble tabletop on which you busted your head open as a child. No, these dudes aren’t here to fuck around.
Picture Viking Berserkers roaming a countryside, and Black Soul Choir, would easily soundtrack the scene. Pit one man with a bazooka and a knife against the assembled forces of death and destruction, and Wolves Like Us will give him strength. At the end of the day, that’s all some people want, and these men are playing to their base.
Let’s celebrate that for a moment, because rare is the occasion when it’s enough to call a band a “rock band”. Sub-genres like art rock or blues rock or supposed indie rock or space rock or metal or whatever else all serve to divvy everything up into ghettos to which it is easier to belong. Gone are the days of Best Buy putting everything from the Beastie Boys to the Beatles to NOFX to Nirvana to Van Halen to Wilco in the same section, labeling it “Rock”, and being done with it. We’re so sophisticated by this point that just saying something is Rock and Roll, or even Hard Rock, doesn’t tend to cut the mustard.
That is, until something like Wolves Like Us shows up, and you think, “Oh, okay, THIS is rock and roll.”
In one’s own life, any number of bands or moments “rock”, and for whatever reason. To me personally, “rocking” means Titus Andronicus, Wolfmother, Ty Segall, Jack White in red-and-black, and My Morning Jacket late-night at Bonnaroo, each for vastly different reasons, but all connected by the primal force certain moments, songs and individuals spoke to or continue to speak to within me. I know I’m not alone in using that criteria, though I am also aware that the conceptualization of what rock’s is never the exact same for any two people.
With Wolves Like Us, we have a band that exists for no reason BUT to rock. On Black Soul Choir, they did their level best to write a full-length LP that also rocks, and they succeed on that point without question. Cue it up, crank the volume, and wander that imaginary wilderness with your broadsword at the ready, carving up evil-doers and protecting the forces of good, thrusting your blade anew on each palm-muted-guitar-and-thunder-drum transition.
There’s something honorable, noble, in attempting to rise above the ghettoization of rock in 2014 to play powerful, straight ahead ROCK AND FUCKING ROLL music that sticks to the basics, sticks to your bones, and doesn’t try to be something it’s not. The effort of Wolves Like Us on Black Soul Choir is eminently worthy of any heavy music fan’s respect in this regard: it cannot be denied that this record rocks like an absolute motherfucker.
Rating: 3/5