The two-piece, male/female garage rock combo is common enough these days to almost be a cliché, although it’s noteworthy that the musical offspring of the White Stripes more often than not tend to outstrip (or outstripe) their predecessors creatively. Jack ‘n’ Meg always felt rather too contrived for my liking, from the ‘are they sister and brother or boyfriend or girlfriend or both’ feeble mystery through to the visual styling and the dubious boasts of how quickly and cheaply they recorded their albums (a claim rendered laughable by the very expensive videos then made to promote this supposedly stripped back sound).
I’m not saying that The Ghost Wolves, hailing from Austin, Texas, are necessarily any more authentic – but they probably are. More to the point, Carley and Jonathan Wolf make a rather fine, low-fi, bumping and grinding basic rock ‘n’ roll sleaze sound. Listening to this album, you won’t be able to avoid imagining hopped-up go-go dancers shaking it in some backroom night spot of ill repute and dubious legality, probably situated out in the desert and patronised only by escaped killers and lost souls. That’s how goddamned cool this is.
The Ghost Wolves sound is genuinely as basic as it comes – at times it is literally a one-string guitar and drum backing track that has both a Cramps-like no-nonsense sound and a sleazy, almost glam rock-flavoured vibe by way of punk rock circa 1976 (or 1966, come to think of it). The former is exemplified by opener Shotgun Pistol Grip, a crude, nasty and swinging slice of no-frills dirty fuzz-drenched blues, while the latter is perfected in Gonna Live, in which Carley’s voice has a cynical, sexy swagger and is backed by glam chants and an infectious groove that you’ll struggle to believe could be made by just two people.
And so it goes for the rest of the album. Baby Fang Thang is a seductively sordid slice of fuzztone madness and striptease beats, a fantastic piece of sexual psychosis that feels like the musical version of the classic exploitation flick Death Game/The Seducers. Grave Dollas belts along like a bat out of hell, a fast and nasty punk rock number that seems to be in a race with itself that only the listener will win. Glorious!
Ride the Wolf, on the other hand, is a stripped-down, slow blues grinder, the basic primal backbeat and semi-whispered vocals conjuring up a sense of midnight road trips to a Helter Skelter madness, like the outtakes from a David Lynch movie. I Was Wrong is a Sixties garage punk swinger, relentlessly belting out a sound that you can hardly credit to a single string.
Itch has a swampy groove, fuzzed out and frantic, while I’m Yo Mudda is a taunting riff-driven slice of Zeppelin-inspired blues-funk. Attack Attack Attack is as fast, punked up and violent as the title might suggest, while Dangerous Moves has a psychedelic soul flavour spicing up the murder ballad nature of the song (while not a conceptual piece like, say, The Madeline Rust’s Truth or Consequences, if there is a theme running through this album, then it’s sex, violence, murder and revenge – as should be the case with all sleazy blues and stripped down rock ‘n’ roll albums).
While a record like this almost demands to be played on vinyl, you should be aware that the CD version of the album winds up with three live bonus tracks – Lies I Told is a long, slow trip into the other side of madness, deliberately plodding and moody, while White Lily is fast and furious and Mosquito is probably the most stripped back of all the tracks, the first half of the track being nothing but percussion and vocals, sounding like the backing track to ritual sacrifice before the guitar thunders in like Satan being conjured up. It’s rather impressive and a fine way for the album to end, and worth making the vinyl sacrifice to own.
In a decent world, you’d be able to walk into a dingy bar, order yourself an insanely strong drink and sit back to watch a mescaline-inspired stripper engaged in some sort of hypnotic and pagan performance while The Ghost Wolves play in the background. Given that you almost certainly can’t do that, the next best thing is to dig out an old Something Weird 1960s go-go compilation video, turn out the lights and play this as loud as you can without being arrested. A work of wonder and glory, Man, Woman, Beast is an astounding, blistering, scuzzy and sexy sonic attack not to be missed.
DAVID FLINT
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