Wolfmother – Cosmic Egg

Categories : Music Reviews, Rock + Pop.

Rating: 3 / 5
Reviewer: Jon Roe

If you’ve heard Wolfmother’s self-titled debut album, you know what you’re going to get when you plug Cosmic Egg in for the first time: straight-ahead, heavily ’70s-influenced hard rock.

The band made their name with the single ‘Woman,’ which enjoyed widespread play on worldwide radio stations. Since that time, bass and keyboard player Chris Ross and drummer Myles Heskett have departed and were replaced by Ian Peres and Dave Atkins, respectively. Frizzy haired singer and guitarist Andrew Stockdale is still around and they added a fourth member in Aidan Nemeth on rhythm guitar.

It’s easy to pick out the Black Sabbath (the almost straight N.I.B. rip on ‘Sundial’) and Led Zeppelin (the ‘Kashmir’ elements of ’10,000 feet’) influences, which can be taken two ways. Either this band is incredibly derivative and is not worth your time, or they’re paying tribute to an era of music still enjoyed by a great number of people. Either way, it was done better on their debut album.

Cosmic Egg clocks in at just under an hour for the standard edition and a whopping 72 minutes on the deluxe edition. The deluxe edition is definitely too much riff rock to handle, and even when you remove the four additional tracks, Egg is a little too repetitive to consume whole. They mix in a few different feels with ‘White Feather’ and ‘Far Away,’ with a decent amount of success. But the bulk of the listen is grinding and largely uninteresting.

If the ’70s were your era of music, then Cosmic Egg is likely right up your alley. This ain’t no Zeppelin or Sabbath, but they try.

Copyright 2004-2012 Music-Critic.ca | Web Site Developed by Armadillo Studios | Admin Login
To ask about reprinting these reviews on another site, contact Nathan.