Whether or not you like their music, you have to respect the guys in Lupine Howl. Three years after being ejected from Spiritualized by the band's control freak leader Jason Pierce, they're off on their own, unabashedly plying the same exact modern psychedelia that was their old band's calling card. And why shouldn't they? Despite Pierce's perfectionist tendencies, these guys were big architects of the Spiritualized sound, and should have the right to revert to it whenever they see fit.
The Carnivorous Lunar Activities of Lupine Howl is, in name, the first full-length for the new band, though their U.S. debut, the 125 EP, was more or less an album itself, clocking in over the 40-minute mark. Here, they stretch nine songs out over the course of almost a full hour, coating everything with a thick purple haze of noisy guitar and noodly keyboards.
Lupine Howl essentially take the bluesiest moments of past Spiritualized records and use them as the starting point for their sound, placing the emphasis on gritty rock rave-ups, and adding another Marshall to the stack for every orchestra member Pierce hired for Let It Come Down. The sound actually ends up landing closer to the dark, swirling shoegazer sessions of Pierce's old band, Spacemen 3, than it does to anything Spiritualized have put their name on lately.
The most unfortunate aspect of the sound Lupine Howl have settled upon is that it's extremely prone to excess. Nowhere is this more evident than in the rambling, bastard Krautrock breakdown that drags "Carnival" out to an interminable 10:21. The song itself isn't really that bad, possessed of a decent melody, drums and vocals cast adrift in spacy reverb, and some well-layered guitar tracks, but the extremely repetitive, noisy riffs that pile atop one another in the midsection render the full track flaccid and directionless.
Bassist/vocalist Sean Cook holds up well as a frontman, making the most of his strong, if melodically limited, voice and wailing away like a man possessed on his harmonica. But he's often jinxed as he and the rest of the band let the songs escape their grasp. Most of these tracks would be a lot better if the players had the willpower to restrict their length to below five minutes, but nearly every song contains some distracting movement or pointless, noisy outro, diminishing its impact.
For example, "125" comes equipped with a laser guided melody, as Cook stretches out the phrases and really digs into the long notes while Mike Mooney's guitar careens off every audible object in the background. It's all in the endings, though, and the band have sadly decided to take the approach that more is more, piling layer upon layer of feedback on without ever giving thought to shaping it into something memorable the way a true master of the form like Kevin Shields might have. The song lurches to a soupy halt without ever attempting a return to the verse structure that made it work in the first place.
It's not all bad, though-- in fact, the album is bookended by two of its best tracks. The single, "Vaporizer," opens things at a fuzzed-out gallop, announcing Lupine Howl's brand of psych with an authoritative shout. "The Jam That Ate Itself" closes things on a high note, applying one of the band's more restrained arrangements to a killer percussion groove laid down by regular drummer Damon Reece (augmented here by Johnny Mattock, another ex-member of Spiritualized).
The best song of the whole lot, though, is "This Condition," the one track with just the right number of layers and the correct amount of breathing room around the vocals the entire way through. The final line, "I wonder do you ever get the feeling you've been cheated?" may or may not be a swipe at the band's former partner, but it's delivered with incredible feeling, as Cook breaths his soul into his harmonica. It's one of the few moments on the album that really grabs you by the throat and demands that you listen, and it's almost enough to make you forget most of padding the band subjects you to earlier on.
The balancing act between excellence and excess ultimately yields in favor of the band, as even the most labored songs manage to reveal a bit of soul in their verses. If Lupine Howl could simply step back from their songs for a second and realize that what they need is some space in the mix and a bit of a trim, they could start making music on the order of their old band. Hiring an outside producer might not be a bad place to start.
In the end, fans of Spiritualized may enjoy this, and might be interested in checking it out, but few others will be enticed by what they hear. At the very least, Lupine Howl have shown that can hold their own without Jason Pierce, even if the music they make isn't half as transcendent as something like "Broken Heart," or "Ladies and Gentlemen We Are Floating in Space." Given time, though, they could get there.
