Album Review: Wolfmother - Victorious

Stoner-rock is bigger now than ever. The underground is full of sludgy beardos jamming on fuzzy bass riffs, and Zeppelin worshippers are poking their heads into the mainstream.

It's in this climate that Wolfmother — a band that was always too poppy for metalheads, but too bizarre for sustained chart success — drop their fourth full-length, and the results are… interesting.

For the most part, Andrew Stockdale — working mostly with session musicians now — keeps to the Wolfmother ethos of paying tribute to Uriah Heep, Led Zeppelin and Black Sabbath. However, it would be unfair to say that was all that was going on with Victorious. The band leaves their comfort zone with the acoustic, indie jangle of Pretty Peggy and the Lenny Kravitz-esque Baroness. Victorious seems to capture a turning point in Stockdale's journey as a songwriter: moving on from his tried-and-true formulas while also making a bid for relevance in a musical landscape with vastly different politics than when he began.

Whether you see Victorious as an earnest evolution or a callous cash-grab, there's a few things that can't be denied: the songwriting is tighter, the production is lightyears ahead of the band's previous work, and Stockdale is working from a place of focus and direction. This may be the record that propels Wolfmother back into mainstream consciousness, or it may give them some street cred in the stoner-rock scene they missed out on the first time around. Or maybe this will be the same old Wolfmother story: too weird to live, and too rare to die.