The ability to laugh at oneself can be fatal to a young band’s prospects. Should your milieu be heavy metal, the risks are particularly high. Long-haired young men with a boner for Beelzebub’s music do not take kindly to their heroes throwing winks and nudges in the direction of critics. An over-developed sense of irony may, for instance, have killed off The Darkness, a joke group who, once the laughter dried up, saw their career vanish around the u-bend.
Like The Darkness, Melbourne’s Wolfmother celebrate cartoon metal clichés and have a fondness for over-egged fretwork heroics. Crucially though, the trio take themselves and their mission, which is to rock your world until the foundations collapse, seriously.
We know this, in part, because they disavow the usual metal frippery – the PVC, the tresses, the bad denim – and go about their business in an earnest manner normally associated with Jeff Buckley-fixated indie bands.
"Rock has been ruined by inhibitions," proffers Chris Ross, Wolfmother’s keyboard player and bassist. “People worry about how their music will be received rather than just kicking back and playing what comes naturally. We don't analyse what we do or try to impress the critics.”
Ross isn’t sure whether Wolfmother even deserve the heavy metal tag. They are not, he makes clear, life-long devotees. Shooting the breeze with Metallica’s Lars Ulrich recently, the band’s guitarist Andrew Stockdale was forced to admit he’d never heard of the ‘70s proto group Budgie. Ulrich, metal to his boots, was agog.
“Are we a heavy metal band? That’s not for us to say,” Ross avers. “In terms of influences, I'd say we owe most to the stoner and desert metal of outfits like Queens Of The Stone Age.”
Such self-seriousness, obviously, is at odds with Wolfmother’s music. Call it, if you must, a guilty pleasure. In whatever context you wish to enjoy the record, the undeniable truth is that their debut album, Wolfmother, purely and simply, is a blast, illuminated by Stockdale’s sub-Plant falsetto and lyrics such as “We drank from the serpent’s vine, now we live in another time".
And anyway, it’s not as if the threesome knew the difference between – excuse us – stoner metal, desert metal and rock your balls off, metal metal, when they started playing dive clubs in their teens.
Pressed, Ross admits that AC/DC and Ozzy Osbourne were formative influences. In fact, his Damascus-style conversion to the cause of playing loud and hard came while watching a Black Sabbath tribute band perform.
Signed last year to Melbourne’s fashionable Modular label, Wolfmother were dispatched to Los Angeles, the debauched rocker’s natural roost, to write an LP. By coincidence, they ended up recording at Sound City Studios, where Nirvana made Nevermind. Did Kurt’s ghost haunt the sessions?
“To visit the place you'd never guess Nirvana had been there,” Ross rues. “It was just this very plush recording studio in downtown LA. I don’t think there’s anything of Kurt in the place.”