Buzzin Music

Josiah Wolf – Jet Lag – album review

Josiah Wolf - Jet Lag

Having been unacquainted with the Ohio group Why? up until the a few weeks ago, it is a fairly neutral starting point with which I perceived Josiah Wolf’s, the drummer for this band, debut album Jet Lag. All the same, ‘drummer’s solo effort’ tends to set alarm bells ringing.

It conjures up the image of the bitter rhythm-keeper stuck at the back of the stage, ignored in the rehearsal rooms, silently harbouring deluded visions of solo fame that grow wilder as the backstage jokes fly at him and the girls still won’t recognise him.

Generally the manifestations of such a traumatic experience are not acoustic ruminations on the subject of the break-up of an eleven year relationship and a move back to a childhood place. As such we learn, albeit in a roundabout manner, that Josiah Wolf must be considered as an artist in his own right.

With this lack of prejudice then, his solo album begins. Most striking are the vocals. Wolf’s voice is multi-faceted and as such, mainly intriguing. At times, such as on the ruminative ‘The One Sign’, he uses a detached delivery akin to Bill Callahan’s deep drawl, at times a more candid voice pierces the fourth wall (“And truly, truly / you move right through me” on ‘In The Seam’), and at other times he moves tentatively into the upper octaves, finding a faltering, susceptible aspect to his delivery.

Lyrics are, as should be the case more than normally on such personal albums, highly important. Reflective, reminiscent, and descriptive of personal and abstract as well as mundane moments, they focus less on explaining or trying to understand a course of events as describing them and expressing the lack of understanding that can be drawn from them. “California, what have you done to me?”, Wolf asks on ‘Master Cleanse (California)’ with candid perplexity.
The arrangements are less striking than you would hope for lyrics of his class, and as such their weight gets lost a little. Working a sort of chamber-pop cum Americana cum singer-songwriter style, in which Wolf plays all instruments himself, it is sad to see the described uniqueness of his experiences lost in what sounds like a band effort. Often with the music, you get the feeling that Wolf’s monism is lost by his attempt to split himself into so many different instrumentalists.

Jet Lag is what gets called an ‘accomplished’ or ‘assured’ solo debut, where accomplished and assured are the signs of a man marking his ground as a solo artist without entirely coming out from behind his drums and the back of the stage.

Jet Lag by Josiah Wolf is released on 29th March by Anticon. It was mixed by younger brother and Why? frontman Yoni Wolf.

Here’s a link to the MySpace page.