It’s soul music, baby, but not as we
know it. The backbeat and the handclaps are still there and the horns
still sound. The bass bumps, the organ screams and the guitars still
twang, but the singer has left the room. Everything is shades of blue.
This is soul music for the after hours. For the solitary dancers and the
lonely hearts. The soundtrack to solitary headlights on a midnight
highway. What to call it? Who cares! Can you dance to it? Just try not
to. No one’s telling you to throw your hands up in the air, but no one
would be surprised if you did. It’s dark here, so you can do your own
thing.
Wooden Boy was recorded by The Cactus Channel
— a ten-piece band from Melbourne, Australia — all born in the 90s and
raised on the internet.
Yet somehow, this astonishing follow up to last
year’s rave-reviewed debut, Haptics, sounds like it could have
been recorded in the 1970s, or possibly in the distant future. A
timeless, placeless cinematic odyssey, Wooden Boy could have been
an alternate soundtrack to Ghost Dog — if Lalo Schifrin and the Meters
were collaborating on the RZA’s score. Or maybe Wooden Boy was
what happened when Lars Von Trier got invited to direct an episode of
Soul Train. What any of it may actually mean is left to the listener’s
imagination.
Funk aficionados will hear shades of New
York on this record, echoes of El Michel’s taking on Wu Tang, the
influence of Budos and Menehan et al. But this is the Generation Z
version; both more tempestuous and more introverted. Recorded analog in
the digital era, presented faceless in the celebrity era, inexplicably
ambiguous in the soundbite era, is this the album the world needs right
now? Undoubtedly yes. In a world where the NSA can read the text message
that dumped you, what does a person need more than sad soul music from
the future? Wooden Boy, baby, Wooden Boy.
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