Nothing gets the alarm bells ringing louder than those dreaded words ‘Hollywood remake’. Patrick Wolf is having a crack at the audio equivalent – a retrospective of his own career re-recorded with extra bassoon and piano. I’m sure that’s exactly what you thought was missing all these years!
Unfortunately, Wolf has also chosen to extract a lot of the elements that make him such an interesting and singular talent. His relentless drive to experiment led to a different approach to pop and electronica, honed on using whatever junk shop equipment he could get his hands on. Sadly, spontaneity has been replaced here by an approach that sounds blandly uniform in tone.
To add a further twist to the remake tale, this is a 16-track double album, over-elaborating on the same sparse soundscape over a patience-testing two discs. Sundark is intended as the more sombre half while Riverlight is the more positive, but the only marked difference seems to be in lyrical content. ‘The Magic Position’ is a beacon of warm-sounding light in this context, a welcome reprieve from everything around it.
In truth, I really don’t know what possessed Patrick Wolf to do this project. He recently called it “a conscious rebellion against the digital age of Auto-tune and mass produced electronic landfill music.” When you think about it, just about anyone who doesn’t make commercial electro-pop could say the same.