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Wind In The Wires

by

Patrick Wolf

 
Wind In The Wires
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Avg: 4.0 (54 ratings)

  • We Say...

    Review by Nick Southall

    Intriguing, folk-influenced electronic pop
    For this, his second record, Patrick Wolf fled the London music scene in disgust and found himself holed-up on the craggy coastline of England’s southwest peninsula, Cornwall.

    The resultant album is a broadly conceptual affair, the lyrics of opener “The Libertine” describing Patrick’s disillusionment (“And in this drought of truth and invention/ Whoever shouts loudest gets the most attention”) while the sampled clip-clops, 4/4 electronic rhythm and hooky violin riffs paint a picture of a grimy, Victorian London.

    The following track, “Teignmouth,” takes in the train journey to the southwest, pianos backed with an electric whirring that conjures images of erratic coastal weather patterns, while crunching, distant rhythms evoke the click-clack of train tracks and Patrick yearns for “The wind to carry me free”.

    “The Railway House” and “The Gypsy King” describe the ramshackle cottages he wrote the album in (“Let’s paint these walls/ And pull up the weeds”), while brief, beautiful segues orchestrally anchor the album’s mid-section. The title track is a dramatic peak, a subtly epic rumination on man’s place within the cycles of nature that churns around guitar chords, violin, and gathering synthetic clouds of sound.

    Throughout Wind In The Wires, Patrick seamlessly melds minimal, ukulele-and-violin-driven folk with avant-garde electronic pop, the priapic yelps of his identity-crisis debut largely replaced with a more thoughtful and ruminative tone, bar the brief accordian-meets-drill’n’bass beats of “Jacob’s Ladder” and the spitting, ukulele-driven identity crisis of “Tristan”.

    Patrick’s journey home begins with an epiphany during the theatrical “This Weather,” recognising “I am not going to set myself free here” during a battle between acoustic delicacy and pulsing, electronic chaos. And so with “Eulogy” he bids Cornwall farewell, and by “Land’s End” has returned to London, enthused once more, a record pressed and eager to be released and toured. That record is Wind in the Wires, a beautiful document of a strange journey by a singular talent.

  • They Say...

    Review by James Christopher Monger, All Music Guide

    There's little doubt that the emotional turbulence of youth serves as the artist's first muse. As we grow older that muse takes on more and more baggage, rendering its initial miserable/joyous purity lost amongst the responsibilities of adulthood. Multi-instrumentalist/singer/songwriter Patrick Wolf harnessed that angst on 2003's moody and apocalyptic Lycanthropy, and has refined it without losing any of its edge on his latest: the elegant, volatile and still kind of apocalyptic Wind in the Wires. Wolf's voice has matured -- he's still only 21 -- into a lonely and powerful tool of judgment. He pines like Ian McCulloch -- there's a definite Echo & the Bunnyman tone to the whole affair -- and takes the occasional left turn into Jeff Buckley-falsetto territory, always in the service of the song -- the stark "Railway House" blends the two effortlessly. Lyrically, Wolf may revel in the Gothic imagery of artists like Nick Cave and Tom Waits -- "The circus girl fell off her horse and now she's paralyzed/the hitchhiker was bound and gagged, raped on the roadside" -- but there's a young man's honest pain behind all of the flowery English vernacular. Like the Divine Comedy's Neil Hannon, he both loathes and lusts for the U.K. Whether he's walking alone along its windswept moors ("Ghost Song") or preparing for its annihilation -- the brutal "Tristan" -- he's armed to the teeth with an arsenal of violins, pump organs and his trusty laptop to tell its all too familiar story, that alienation is universal and art is its only trusted interpreter.

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