Post by jacky on Jun 13, 2009 14:25:00 GMT
The review isn't online and only in german, so I tried to translate it, hope you like it
* * * * 1/2
THE BACHELOR: The pop genius combines kitsch and art in a perfect way
Wolfsboy with fiddle, androgyn nature-boy, lover in technicolor – Patrick Wolf has done a lot incarnations in the last six years. When two years ago he executes the love drunk synthiepop of THE MAGIC POSITION, he was preoccupied with other things. Though he still wore the same red mane like on the previous album cover, but it was only a periwig. He cut his hair and wanted to stop his live career, worked on a dark techno album called BATTLE. Good title for sure. Not only because he recorded the new tracks in a little southenglish town with the same name, but he mutate from beeing a lover into a lonesome warrior.
But the next metharmphose comes close behind and so Battle changed into two discret albums. The current album THE BACHELOR bargains for the end of a love, THE CONQUEROR which will see the light of day next year, is about new luck. So let’s got into the war zone. The air raid warning in the opener “Kriegsspiel” passed into the sound of a violin, a laptop panics, the fiddle plays while the guitar and drums introduce and Patrick Wolf applies as much as pathos so you could think he wanted to trump Maximo Park’s Paul Smith: »I’ll work harder, harder / for resolution/ show me some revolution/ this battle will be won«. The subsequent “Oblivion” is a big addictive emo-pop-gesture. Actually Patrick Wolf has never been such lavish with melodies and emphasis. But for sure he once again form cracks and assembles a lot of fractures.
Folk singer Eliza Carthy adds for a duett in the titel song and accounts for this hybrid amalgam equally as Matthew Herbert’s beats did or the noise collages of Alec Empire. Also Tilda Swinton, who embodies a wolf role model in Sally Potter’s Virginia Wolf film adaption “Orlando” (the century traveller and eternal genderbending lad), has some guest appearences as the voice of unconscious. In short: The Bachelor is the perfect marriage of kitsch and art, a monument of string glaze and noise, beats and celtic flutes, electroclash and touching piano ballads, pain and hope. If you gird yourself for the battle with this arsenal, you can only win.
* * * * 1/2
THE BACHELOR: The pop genius combines kitsch and art in a perfect way
Wolfsboy with fiddle, androgyn nature-boy, lover in technicolor – Patrick Wolf has done a lot incarnations in the last six years. When two years ago he executes the love drunk synthiepop of THE MAGIC POSITION, he was preoccupied with other things. Though he still wore the same red mane like on the previous album cover, but it was only a periwig. He cut his hair and wanted to stop his live career, worked on a dark techno album called BATTLE. Good title for sure. Not only because he recorded the new tracks in a little southenglish town with the same name, but he mutate from beeing a lover into a lonesome warrior.
But the next metharmphose comes close behind and so Battle changed into two discret albums. The current album THE BACHELOR bargains for the end of a love, THE CONQUEROR which will see the light of day next year, is about new luck. So let’s got into the war zone. The air raid warning in the opener “Kriegsspiel” passed into the sound of a violin, a laptop panics, the fiddle plays while the guitar and drums introduce and Patrick Wolf applies as much as pathos so you could think he wanted to trump Maximo Park’s Paul Smith: »I’ll work harder, harder / for resolution/ show me some revolution/ this battle will be won«. The subsequent “Oblivion” is a big addictive emo-pop-gesture. Actually Patrick Wolf has never been such lavish with melodies and emphasis. But for sure he once again form cracks and assembles a lot of fractures.
Folk singer Eliza Carthy adds for a duett in the titel song and accounts for this hybrid amalgam equally as Matthew Herbert’s beats did or the noise collages of Alec Empire. Also Tilda Swinton, who embodies a wolf role model in Sally Potter’s Virginia Wolf film adaption “Orlando” (the century traveller and eternal genderbending lad), has some guest appearences as the voice of unconscious. In short: The Bachelor is the perfect marriage of kitsch and art, a monument of string glaze and noise, beats and celtic flutes, electroclash and touching piano ballads, pain and hope. If you gird yourself for the battle with this arsenal, you can only win.