Music: Jonathan Fire*Eater "Wolf Songs For Lambs"

For an album that turns ten years old this October, Wolf Songs for Lambs has aged remarkably well. In fact, I can’t imagine listening to this in 1997, the same year Jewel, The Wallflowers, Third Eye Blind and the Spice Girls were burning up the charts. Upon listening to this album, the immediate thought is “this sounds just like Clinic or Clap Your Hands Say Yeah or any of those other hyped band-of-the-minute.” But this came out years before any of that, so I’m left wondering where this came from. I guess I should investigate early-to-mid-90s indie rock, but I just can’t get into Pavement. I’ve tried.

So, to the album at hand. I first acquired this from a friend almost two years ago along with 900 other songs. This got lost in the shuffle until I decided to listen to the whole thing from beginning to end a week or so ago. The overall mystery surrounding this band and its placement in the late-90s music hellhole has become as integral as the music to me when listening to this album. The cocky confidence that spits out of “Station Coffee” and snotty rhythm of “No Love Like That” baffle me with their relevance to today’s music and their innate catchiness. These two are the highlights of the album for me, by far. The pulsating and pounding beats mixed with 60s garage/circus keyboards of “Bipolar Summer” provide another stand out along with the opener, “When the Curtain Calls for You.”

And now is where I bring up what this band turned into after their demise: the Walkmen. I don’t like the Walkmen. I’ve tried. I like “The Rat” and “We’ve Been Had.” There are one or two other songs on Bows + Arrows that I can get behind, but overall I just find their wall of sound and pummeling and unchanging rhythms to be monotonous and void of a catchy melody. I don’t get it. I’m still trying, though. And there are moments on this album that give evidence that Hamilton Leithauser, the main difference between the two bands, is not entirely at fault for this sound. “Everybody Plays the Mime” and the album’s closing songs, “A Night in the Nursery” and “Impatient Talent Show,” do that thing that I hate for music to do: focus on creating an atmosphere. That may be fine to some people, but not me. I love the Apples in Stereo and the Hives, if that’s any indication as to my thoughts on ‘atmosphere.’

The album’s okay and I can get into this more so than the Walkmen. Maybe that’s because it seems like the band has more of a rebellious swagger to them (like early Strokes) than the Walkmen, a band that seems to really believe their own hype.

MY SCORE: 6.5 (out of 10)