Live Review Wolf Alice @ the Fonda, 10/13

 

Perhaps the best way to describe Wolf Alice’s live show is to describe its audience.  In the crowd I saw shirts for bands as diverse as Cage the Elephant, The Jon Spencer Blues Explosion, Mastodon and Marvin Gaye.  I saw a woman carrying an XL Records tote, and I saw that guy who’s in that new Goosebumps movie.  I saw a dude wearing a Foo Fighters baseball hat and I saw an actual Foo Fighter (no, it wasn’t Dave Grohl).

Which is all to say, for a band that has only barely released one album – this past summer’s My Love is Cool – Wolf Alice’s non-specific but highly charged sound has been able to pick up fans from all over the spectrum.  Assigning any particular genre is difficult, but the band’s sound reminds me of some blend of the friendlier side of grunge, big mid-00s alternative guitar, and a wealth of sing-along moments.  All in all, My Love is Cool about as listenable an album as we ever get, the kind of record you don’t realize you’re addicted to until it’s too late.

Wolf Alice is still a young enough band that they’re still figuring out how to really rock a crowd – they’ve written arena rock anthems before they’ve quite figured out how to properly detonate them live.  That’s not to say they were slouches on stage either, though; they easily whipped up the crowd into a frenzy that lasted their hour-long set.  But let’s be honest, when a band gets to play songs as well produced, bright and promising as the ones found on My Love is Cool, they’ll probably be able to pull off a pretty good show.