Patrick Wolf - The Bachelor

Patrick Wolf’s latest album is admittedly not something which instantly grows on the listener. It opens uninvitingly with the alienating harshness of an electric crescendo that is immediately alarming and disconcerting. Putting the listener on alert, this harshness bleeds into a couple of the heavier tracks on the album, namely, ‘Vulture’ and ‘Battle’. Even with Wolf singing about “higher powers putting gods to war”, ignorance, fear, death and other evils of humanity, the album is, on a deeper level, a homage to love and courage in fighting against everything which threatens to drag one into oblivion and is a reminder of all that is, or was once, beautiful.

The album is volatile, fleeting and inconstant with unexpected twists and turns. Blending techno with folk music, Wolf has outdone himself. Fluctuating from being dark and violent to being romantically melodious, the album is like a little journey down the paradoxically “blessed” and “cursed” road. Just when the listener is comfortably settling down to a sense of homecoming in ‘Thickets’, the promise that “home is just a little further up the hill” is subverted; the listener is thrown into the thick of rave-metal with ‘Battle’.

Wolf mysteriously refers to a young minister who has an important message to deliver in ‘Count of Casualty’. He ends the album with an appropriate track entitled ‘The Messenger’ and reveals that he is the messenger himself who is travelling down the perilous “cursed” road in a world of animosity, wars and casualties. What is this message that Wolf is desperately trying to save humanity with? The answer is the hope that love, albeit unattainable or forever lost in distant memories of the past, brings.

Look out for the Yorker's interview with Patrick Wolf next week.

Patrick Wolf: official website | MySpace | on Spotify

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