3 LITTLE WOLVES - 'Firebug' EP

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Serendipity.

As new music from 3 Little Wolves arrives the ship that is my family has sprung a leak, illness, sickness, disease has pierced the bow and we are sinking.  Gasping, drowning…but somehow still alive.

“And when your ship is sinking…do all you can to make you feel better, and when a storm is brewing…do all you can to make you feel better” (Firebug)

A sonic patch that has stopped the slow drift to the bottom of the ocean, maybe we will make it to shore after all.

God bless the Wolves.

The remarkable thing about the “Firebug E.P” is that it sounds like a band who actually care.  They care about the songs and the words and the chords and the melody…they care about the music.  There is heart and soul here.  There are ideas and observations.  What is absent is the ghost of the obvious inspirations.  Here are a band who have cast the net a little wider, swam a little further, dived a little deeper to find things that light the fire within them.

Take “We Don’t Know” with its butterfly wings, delicate, almost too fragile, gently fluttering and driving onwards.  It is a song with an aching heart, written for those of us with breaking hearts.  Comfort and joy.  Every word and every note is as soft and as gentle as it can be.  Not the lumpen, heavy handed, faux gentility of some but a sincere, heartfelt, from the heart, last dance of a song.

There are “new” bands who shout and yell, who see lad cultures demise as a tragedy, who yearn for the bad old, good old days.  Romping through the rock and roll standards.  Utterly lacking in poetry, soul or a desire to be anything other  than to be featured on some playlist that has been lovingly curated by the P.A of some celebrity or other.

But when you listen to the closing track, “Homecoming”, with its rolling piano and soaring strings you are made very aware of the fact that these little wolves have arrived to blow the straw house of copy-cut-and-paste, slash and burn, rock sans roll, that is so much of what is hailed as “great” or “legendary”.  It has all the grandeur of “Dog Man Star” era Suede and I can’t think of a finer compliment for any new band than that.

I still haven’t looked at a picture or read a press release for 3 Little Wolves.  Maybe some of the “real” journalists on the internet would have and then would have studiously copied someone else's words about the band into their “review”.  But I’m not a real journalist.  I’m not even sure I’m a real person.  I’m a man who is just about keeping his head above the water line right now and I couldn’t be more grateful to 3 Little Wolves…for all the things they are, of course, musicians, writers, poets but, today, I am grateful for all the things they are not…careless, craftless and copyists.

You should be grateful too.

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