Wolf Man and the Airship Captain is a band fronted
by my good friend Gus, under the pseudonym I’m still trying to talk him out of,
Constantine Xilver. Me and him have been
making movies for a couple years now and will continue making movies together until
his untimely death.
(Me and
Gus (right) scouting locations for our upcoming surrealist epic,
Bundeloafe II: The
Return of Jafar.)
Wolf Man also has other people in it. I’m friends with all of them but one. Henry Randall plays guitar, Jack Lynch plays
drums, Colman Hickey plays keys, and Max Kilcup plays bass. Max Kilcup is the one I’m not friends
with. No particular reason behind that. We’re just not. And we never will be.
I’ve been going to their shows for a while, and I
like them. But don’t take my totally
biased word for it! They’ve recently
come out with a three-track EP that you can listen to for free!
It’s called Wolf Baby. You can listen to it here:
Wolf Baby is really cool. It's tiny, but doesn't use that as an excuse to not do anything interesting with the order of the songs, and there's definitely a logic to how they did that. It starts out with the
anthem to fucking awesome, We Rob Banks, the show-closing number for nearly all
of their live shows. There was a demo version released a while back that never
really got near to capturing the energy of their live performance of the
song. The Wolf Baby version gets it right.
That leads us into the less driving, but more
contemplative and no less rocking Oreo cream of the middle, Mallomarz. It
has some pretty fucking sweet keys and fucking taint punching fucking rocking
drums. Also has probably my favorite lyrics in
any of their songs.
The three-track album closes with a really cool,
mellow ballad called Crystal Earth. It’s
a song sort of alien to the rest of the Wolf Man songs I’ve heard, but not an unwelcome kind of alien. Total
fucking ear candy. Here’s a beautiful
video accompanying the song in question.
Crystal Earth ends the album having changed shit up
and revealed a new side to them that I’m looking forward to seeing. I’d be cool going to their shows and showing
support for my friends even if they coasted on doing what is familiar to them,
namely gritty, distorted, high-energy, rock.
But if the promise in Crystal Earth means anything, and I think it does,
I’m actually looking forward to hearing new shit from them, and support of my friends isn't the driving force behind actively following them anymore.