I Love Wolf Alice, So Blue Weekend Makes Total Sense

I was introduced to this band one lazy weekend with my Dad channel surfing at our family home in Michigan. We found ourselves on Ovation, I believe, watching reruns of music festivals, when all of a sudden, the opening strums of the solemnly optimistic love song "Lisbon" rang out. Frontwoman Ellie Rowsell started singing her opening bars, "You're gonna look at me twice, it's eventual/You're there when you're not cause I'm smoking your menthols/Smoking your menthols." Then the group got louder. Joel Amey's kit cycled ferociously through eighth- and sixteenth-note patterns and Ellie wailed behind her microphone in the echo of sound which would define the shoegaze I was now hearing for the first time. I later learned that their guitarist Joff Oddie had ripped his fingers during the act, and I had no idea. I was too excited for what I was hearing, exclaiming to my dad, "This sounds like a real rock band!"

I hope to not come across as snobbish or pretentious here (though it may be inevitable, I was sixteen at the time). I was rediscovering classic rock at the time, circling through Velvet Underground and the Rolling Stones' catalog for myself in Apple Music's marble pantheon of sound. Falling in love with long-gone acts like Pink Floyd or even past-their-prime performers like Bob Dylan emphasized the feeling I was coming in at the end. This was exemplified by my adoration of 90s alt-rock and grunge in particular. I knew about Kurt Cobain's death and was not surprised by it, but every other major grunge outfit has ghosts haunting their legacy. 

The most painful one was Chris. After he died in my hometown of Detroit, I learned of his legacy as a singer and lead vocalist for Soundgarden and sought some of the band's music out. I could not have been more surprised. I absolutely loved them. Put aside their adventurous rhythm section, put aside their capabilities as a group for a moment. As truly great as the band was, Chris Cornell was someone special. He was by far the most gifted vocalist among Eddie, Kurt, and Layne, being able to mourn in hushed tones and squeal in the upper registers like no one else. He sang as a fallen angel, surrounded by decay and who nevertheless hoped for peace and liberation from his demons. 

And he's gone. So are the dozens of artists and bands who mean so much to me.

I am saying all this to showcase how primed I was for Wolf Alice in 2017. Their first two albums -- their debut My Love Is Cool and their then-upcoming Visions of a Life -- had the instrumentation of the alt-rock era I adored so much, with their tracks "Moaning Lisa Smile," "Sadboy" and "Giant Peach" delivering their distorted goods with a wide aura of sound only matched by Oasis, switching Liam Gallagher's sarcasm with Ellie's conditional sweetness. They were ambitious as well, stretching into punk with "Yuk Foo" and toned down songwriter treatises in "Turn to Dust" and the outro to "The Wonderwhy." The only thing which frustrated me about the outfit was that, while it had international success and was very successful in the U.K., my home country had them firmly under the radar, and while I had domestic acts like the Boygenius crew and Father John Misty to fall back to, it simply wasn't the same.

After their 2018 concert in Detroit and their Mercury Prize win, I had a few years to sit with this band's repertoire. All my opinions on them settled, with even their weaker tracks like "Sky Musings" and "Swallowtail" coming close to my heart as well. With such a long stint between releases, I thought I was ready for their next project. I was wrong.

Even while I proclaimed their adaptability with different musical approaches within their works, all my favorite songs of theirs were of a certain ilk. "Lisbon," "Space & Time," and "Moaning Lisa Smile" all were broad performances of some raw emotional feeling of selfless love, inadequacy, and finding yourself outpaced by your mortality, respectfully. To put it simply, they sounded grunge, but bigger and sweeter. After the development of their image through two confident records, my expectations for them were that they would attempt a concept album with this sound, one which I could totally demand from them and would listen to for the rest of my years. It was this mindset that stifled my enjoyment through Blue Weekend's release cycle.

Their first release, "The Last Man on Earth" came out on February 24, and I thought it was... decent. After listening to the first verse and chorus of the song, I had decided that I liked the simplicity of it, and Ellie's singing was as poignant as ever, and with my opinions decided halfway through, I went on with my day. I still don't know why I hadn't come back to the thing, but if I had to guess, it would be that I wanted something bigger as their first release. Because I hadn't heard that in what I heard of the song, I put a pin in it and hoped their next single was exactly what I imagined.

"Smile" should have satisfied me. Joff's central guitar hook is wonderful, reminding me of RATM and Audioslave's confidently melodic rhythm sections, and the chorus was as big and bold as anything they have put out before. Surprisingly, what made me not gravitate as much to the song at first was Ellie's performance on it. She had brazenly came forward to center their piece with rap rock, perhaps the only aspect of 90s rock which I was glad stayed in the past. I perhaps would have appreciated her lyrics more, but I couldn't get around her decision to rhyme "at the bar" with "at the bar" in the bridge. It was at this point where I started to worry, "Were these guys going to make something I don't like?"

Their last song I heard before Blue Weekend's release, "No Hard Feelings," helped me somewhat with this question, as I really liked it on my first listen. Part of it was that it was a new perspective of life that Ellie was presenting to her listeners: heartbreak's quiet resolution. This isn't completely surprising, as she has written before about bad (and worse) romantic experiences on "Giant Peach" and "Formidable Cool," turbulent separation on "Visions of a Life," and resolution from death on "Heavenward" and "St. Purple & Green." However, none of them have been combined into one softly elegant work about what we feel when choosing to let those closest to us go. This is Ellie being kind where she is expected to feel hurt, and I loved that about the song.

Yet I still gave myself an excuse to dislike it. Why? Because of its final line, "No hard feelings, honey/As we both will take the win." It was literally the last word on the last line of the song which took me out of the work. I could understand many ways of describing that central decision -- solace, ease, peace, mourning -- but as a win? If it was a win, you'd feel ecstatic, not softly resolved with your decision. And so, even with three good songs coming from Wolf Alice, it was 0-3 for what I had hoped for in their new release. I was not feeling great.

When I had finally got the courage to Fridays ago to check the record out, I looked to see what its reception was and see if it was as mediocre as I already convinced myself. Instead, it became the highest-rated album of 2021 so far. A full-blown green square 97. I felt conflicting feelings about it. The dominant emotion was elation for the band I love, leading me to gush about their critical success to my family in our group chat. The second emotion, however, was confusion. I was so unsure of what I had perceived that record I had just heard to be. It was better than I had hoped, but... I couldn't have gotten something wrong here, could I?

The biggest change in the record was the mental standpoint of the songwriting throughout the LP. Many of the tracks are just as raw and visceral as ever, but from a perspective recalling the band's experiences throughout their twenties, when they were once in their twenties writing about their adolescence. Pieces like "Don't Delete the Kisses" spoke from a place of levity, where Ellie is outspoken in her fantasies of buoyant romance with a special someone. It is a new experience for her, yet on Blue Weekend, her experiences with men are anything but new. She has turned from "a little bit drunk" to "Marilyn Monroe/If you're all popping pills, you know I won't say no" on Delicious Things. Her humiliation and possible trauma she displays in "You're a Germ" and "Formidable Cool" has switched into an attitude of frivolousness, forgiveness, and a touch of past regret, best displayed by the sing-songy track "Safe from Heartbreak (if you never fall in love)." 

The retrospection on her tributes to the dead "Heavenward" and "St. Purple & Green" are now present in settings where she was once too emotionally immersed. Her letters of friendship have turned into a negotiation of her drinking buddy's bitchiness versus her own self-loathing in "The Beach." Her outrage anthems of old have turned meta, with Ellie claiming on "Smile" that it is the pressure of outside critics that brings her to the breaking points she wrestles with in her songs ("And if you think I'm unhinged/But wind it up and this honeybee stings/Did you think I was a puppet on strings?/Wind her up, and this honeybee sings!"). Unlike other unfortunate alt-rock bands who can't move past the period of their heyday, Wolf Alice demonstrate one essential quality of a great artist, and that is the ability to craft rich, evocative tracks beyond their inspired beginnings.

The second quality, of course, is their sound. No, scratch that: not the sound, the spirit of the artist. A sound can be mimicked in a production booth, parodied, but the spirit of the artist must reverberate into their performance, into their image, backwards and forwards throughout their history as an outfit. Radiohead left their sound with The Bends and carried their spirit with OK Computer. Wolf Alice had a sound with Visions of a Life, but they left it mostly behind throughout the duration of Blue Weekend. 

One set of tracks in the middle of the record demonstrate this best. Folksy finger plucking and choral harmonies reverberate in "Safe from Heartbreak," providing a gentle atmosphere mirroring the gentle call from melancholy Ellie pushes for in the song. This then transitions into a mid-80s keyboard ballad in "How Can I Make It OK?", clarifying that the band's signature quest for peace has not been reached despite their over a decade-long career. This trio concludes with "Play the Greatest Hits," which makes "Yuk Foo" look like "After the Zero Hour." While their anger at least could be pushed against an adversary in the past, this irate punk punch showcases their anger and music as a coping mechanism for the circles of pain they go through in life when they "take its straight white lines." 

They even surprised me in the back half of their first single, "The Last Man on Earth." Remember when I said I decided on my opinion of the song halfway through? I only recognized that in retrospect, shocked at how the song transpired during my album listen. I was not present for the track then, but it was ready for me. Now, I was finally here for its Paul McCartney guitar tones and the bluesy affectations in "A penny for your truuu-uuuth!" This transformed for me into a wondrous song that would be at home in the soft-rock stations half a century back, and yet it sits in harmony with a sonically diverse record from 2021. In utter surprise and elation after the track finished, I had to wonder... "Was I the asshole? Did I make assumptions on who the band was, who they were as people even, and became an unpleasable snob in the process?" I must have. After all, I had to admit, the album was damn good.

Many of the most beloved artists in music history are defined by their inability to fit in a box. As much as I love AC/DC, they are not particularly creative with their sound. Once you've heard a song of theirs, you can figure out what kind the rest of the band's catalog is going to be like pretty easily. A similar thing occurs for genre outfits. If you are a hair metal band, the only people who will love your music are hair metal fans. Everyone else may like a song of yours or two, but you will only be seen as great by those who "get" your style and spirit. What truly makes an artist special, in my eyes, is where you can't imagine anyone else mimicking what they do with their music, whether through their era, trend, or even genre. You can classify The Who and Led Zeppelin and The Rolling Stones as "hard rock" if you wish, but if you tell someone that listening to Sticky Fingers, Houses of the Holy, and Quadrophenia provide the same experience, you would be not just mad, but insulting to all the work those bands put in to make themselves transcend the bounds of rock and roll as we know it.

I had told myself that Wolf Alice is that kind of band. I didn't need anyone else to affirm what I felt about them, I thought. I justified their worth by talking about great songs I chose not to listen to. I had my own image of the band in my head, my own image of Ellie, and that vision was so important to me and vital to my self-worth that my instinct was to balk at the slightest deviation from the plan I had set for a quartet of musicians I didn't know. At this point, after finally listening to Blue Weekend, I had to make a choice; become a Metallica fan, or someone else.

To fully appreciate this band's greatness, I need to accept that whatever they do, they are going to surprise and perhaps even disappoint me, and that's OK. I believe I have done so, and I hope for great things for them in the future. In the unlikely event that my love for this band wanes, I'll always have those first two records to put on once more, and I hope that whatever happens, everyone else can appreciate the unconventional beauty of Wolf Alice like I have.