You Are Wolf - Hunting Little Wolf Album Review

If you've always felt that not enough contemporary pop music addresses the fate of Sedna, Inuit goddess of the sea, who was thrown from a kayak and drowned by her father and whose fingers, which he chopped off with an axe as she tried to cling to the boat, turned into seals, then Hunting Little Wolf is the album for you. Even if you happen never to have felt that, it's worth a listen; You Are Wolf's Kerry Andrew isn't short of ideas, and her distinctive, ambitious music (which I desperately want to avoid calling 'folktronica', but it contains elements of both folk and electronica, so let's bow to the inevitable) shows plenty of promise.

Andrew's songs are dense, sinister little packages, constructed using cut up layers of her vocal tracks, which are subtly supplemented by samples, abstract electronic noises, tinkling glockenspiel, and touches of bass and guitar. 'Sednastory', for example, begins with Andrew telling the blood-soaked story of the aforementioned Inuit girl; but other voices, other Andrews, start competing for listener's attention, whispering and chanting disembodied words from the story: 'flesh; skin; blood'. As the story reaches its conclusion, and Sedna slowly sinks into the water, other sounds appear: a high pitched whistling noise, harsh and disturbing, and a panicked choking sound. The effect is tense and dramatic: you're drowning with her.

It takes a considerable amount of skill to avoid offputting melodrama when making music this intense, but Andrews just about avoids that pitfall: crucially, she never over-emotes, instead delivering her odd lyrics ('there's a cloud in the sky/like the echo of a gun') in cold and otherworldly voice. This icy intensity, like her vocal layering, recalls Björk's excellent Medulla. Her style and subject matter also echo the music of experimental Finnish folkstress Islaja and The Marble Index, the sepulchral solo work by ex-Velvet Underground muse Nico. More recently, everyone from Tune Yards to M.I.A. has been building music around layers of strange rhythmic sounds, but nobody has ever constructed something quite like 'Catalunyanpoemsong', the record's high point, in which a relatively unpromising subject - a Spanish town waking up after a siesta - is brought to life via a poetic spoken-word lyric and an increasingly chaotic array of noises intended to represent that waking-up process. Hunting Little Wolf is an uncomfortable experience, and not for everybody, but if you can tolerate a little pretension, then there's much to admire.


Nick Gale