Hear Guitar Wolf. Head go mental.
As an unstoppable tide of crowd-surfers, spearheaded by your correspondent, pour on and off the Garage's tiny stage, you have to ask yourself 'are Guitar Wolf the best band ever, or what?'. Because Guitar Wolf – self-styled ‘Japanese Greatest ‘Jet’ Rock’n’Roll band’ – know that true rock'n'roll is about thinking less and feeling more.
Support band The Hells are entertaining enough, with their precision controlled grind-clang garage-rock, guitar-as-pounding-machine Sturm und Drang and silhouette-sharp low-life imagery like 'He's the Devil But I Love Him So', but goddamn it, rock'n'roll isn't about control, it's about chaos. It's not about being cool, it's about losing control and blowing off all that tedious shit the squares feed you all day long, man. To this end, Guitar Wolf are noble and pure. “Pollock paintings rendered in noise” reckoned some bloke at the NME, years ago. But really there's more of Warhol than of Pollock: An arch grotesque, a monolithic cartoon of a band. Fed on Elvis and The Ramones and filtered through the sadistically uncompromising approach of their native Japan: The most fucked up society on earth, where even fun is a serious, serious business. And Guitar Wolf are serious fun. For all the multi-gasmic joy to be wrung from the genius of your Van Vliets and your Wilsons, there are few things as quite as satisfying as the aural rape of pure visceral noise.
Seiji (guitarwolf), Billy (basswolf) and Toru (drumwolf), three wiry black leather and sunglasses-clad Brylcreem blokes, rev each and every one of their hard-edged garage rock snarls and pop punk stompers up into a terrifying, shrill blast of distortion and feedback. Guitar Wolf's songs are called things like 'Invader Ace' and 'Jett Love' and are nominally about girls and bikes and guitars and that. But listen to the radio-static snarling guitar and brain rattling rumble of the bass and you'll hear atomic bombs falling on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, Jungian Dinosaur (Godzilla?) Fear and the unforgiving roar of the Tokyo traffic.
Guitar Wolf's grasp of English is, you imagine, shaky at best. Words like 'baby', 'motorcycle' ''energy' and 'leather', well-worn staples of the rock lexicon are reduced to onomatopoeic grunts and shrieks, re-invigorated in their crudeness with all the majesty and menace that legions of overly literary art-rockers have failed to find in these teenage clichés. Even a fantastic cover of Eddie Cochrane's “Summertime Blues” gets a verbal mangling: The suckerpunch of great rock'n'roll transcends international and generational boundaries far better than rhyming couplets about unhip dads and mean-spirited senators.
And this is the secret at the heart of Wolf's power: Their linguistic and musical limitations have forced them to strip their music down to all that is strictly necessary to create havoc in the thrashing moshpit. And at the end of the day, that's what's important, isn't it?
Long live Guitar Wolf. Long Live Rock'n'Roll.
