A record full of dark magic and gypsy flourishes; meteororological menace and folk-tale tragedies; windy nights full of shivers and lullabies and the incantatory verse of the Shipping Forecast. Prepare to be beguiled.
Admittedly, this gangly, porcelain-skinned English boy with a viola, a laptop and a head full of dreams has yet to storm the baroque-romantic palace where a languid Rufus Wainwright holds court, and Devendra Banhart and Anthony And The Johnsons whisper strange tales in the corridors. But with the release of his tenderly alluring second album, Patrick Wolf has spun the rough straw and ghostly atmospherics of a humble West Cornwall studio into fairy gold. It won’t be long, you suspect, before this twenty-one year old is as loved as the artists he fleetingly evokes.
Less beats-driven than his debut, “Lycanthropy”, and lighter on that record’s overwrought lyrical obsessions with sharp teeth and full moons, child-catchers and Peter Pan, werewolves and self-castration, “Wind In The Wires” conjures up an alternately bleak and lush world as old as the West Country hills. Beyond the delicious dashes of digital spice (screeing feedback, radio-static voices and malfunctioning-CD stutters), the songs’ ingredients are as often medieval as modern, as in the echoing, string-led “Apparition”, a wheezing, tick-tocking “Ghost Song” and a ticklingly intimate “The Shadow Sea”.
Clearly, Wolf’s is a haunted but not heartless world; if you were of a new age frame of mind, you’d be calling him an “old soul” and rummaging through your hand-knit rucksack for a few treasured crystals to press upon him. He sings to the sky of lonely freedom in a chilly Joy Division-via-folk title track; he comes across like a latter-day mix of Longfellow, Rimbaud and Poe in a tense, panting tale of cruelty in “The Libertine”. He summons up waltz-time trad ballads in a strummed and twinkling “The Railway House” and “The Gypsy King”, which swirls a highwayman’s cloak across its restless feet.
Vocally, as much of a one-off as our vulpine star-in-waiting clearly is, Wolf’s alternately velvet-rich and lump-throatedly boyish delivery more than lives up to the comparisons bound to be thrown his way. There’s Jeff Buckley and especially Marc Almond in everything from the full-blooded, full-pelt dramatics of “Tristan” to a wintry-pianoed “This Weather”; there’s a touch of Morrissey in the swooning heartbreak of “Teignmouth”. A town which incidentally, surely never expected a tribute so much more heaven than Devon. By the same token, the sparklingly joyous album-closer that is the lilting “Land’s End” will erase glum memories of rainy half-term trekking in a few minutes flat.
by Jennifer Nine