My Latest Novel came together in a soggy Glasgow suburb where, yes, they read. In fact, during an interview, they named Jack Kerouac and Aldous Huxley as influences, the sources of their outlaw intelligence. Their musical pedigree-- tying them to the precious, anxious silver age of Scottish indie-pop-- meshes well with this literary pedigree. All of this translates on the band's debut Wolves into a fiercely split personality, symphony-to-God harmonies, and poetic, double-edged oratory.
"The Hope Edition" captures that bittersweet spirit. But My Latest Novel adds something new to the blueprint drawn by the Jeepster and Chemikal Underground labels: space. Marrying their region's already offbeat pop sensibility to the patient, anti-pop wanderlust championed by Montreal's Constellation Records, the songs on Wolves claim room to inflate and deflate, to meander, to shake loose that dammed-up anomie.
But they are more than a 2+2=5 union of Mogwai and Belle and Sebastian, their fellow Glaswegians. Against the stillness of the Scottish rustbelt, they rebel in their own way, roving perpetually from quiet to loud and singing to talking, light to dark, slow to fast, their restlessness an antidote to sagging spirits. "Ghosts" begins with the flicker of guitars, as if a spaghetti-western duel was brewing in the distance, before violins and a spasm of primal drumming break the silence. Narcissism provides the target here. In the raucous, martial "When We Were Wolves" it's the supremely American fear of faceless threats: "And we run, and we hide, and we hid, and we ran/ And we hide in lightless rooms/ And we banged on our pianos." Away from society, we take refuge in art. Catharsis keeps us sane.
Like the Decemberists, this band knows how to balance sweet arrangements and grim themes. "Learning by Lego" begins harmlessly enough, with harmonies flashing against gentle strums. Suddenly everything roars toward children's-choir anarchy à la The Wall, the jabs at fascism replaced by ominous, shouted nonsense like "Pulling out my hair/ Crushed by plastic lego men."
No less disordered, the two halves of "Wrongfully, I Rested" yield the same mysterious dark-pretty tension. The first movement witnesses a boy pining for an unattainable dreamgirl, the second follows him home, only to stumble into a different nightmare: "Hear him bang, hear him scream in the hallway/ Pray to God, he won't come my way." The lead single "Sister Sneaker, Sister Soul" also riffs sinisterly on unrequited love. This tender orchestral number capsizes under one strange line: "Hiding from the light that she brings with her/ Policies of the worst." For this band, nothing is ever what it seems. An epic restatement of this suspicion, "The Reputation of Ross Francis" details a Ken Lay figure's stab at smooth-talking his way into heaven.
For all the love here, Wolves is about our generation's emotions du jour, doubt and fear, not only of color-coded national alerts, but of the smaller things: a father's angry yell, the intimidating beauty of a classmate, or the outside chance that change isn't just around the corner.
