#wolfmanhattan project

In 2019, when the first Wolfmanhattan Project album surfaced, it seemed like it might be a one off. After all, how often would these three guys’ calendars clear long enough to add to the catalogue? And yet it was worth hoping for another helping of something so good. My review of Blue Gene Stew asked “Who knows what possessed Mick Collins, Kid Congo Powers and Bob Bert to hook up for the Wolfmanhattan Project? But good thing they did, because here we have giddy garage contraption which combines Collins’ sci-fi obsessions, Powers’ hallucinogenic visions and Bert’s power-house pound—along with a hefty helping of fuzzy r ‘n r mayhem.”

With the first album it was possible to discern which member birthed which songs—there were cuts that sounded like the Dirtbombs and songs that sounded like Kid Congo Powers and one barn-burning punker that clearly belonged to Bert. That’s true again, but not as definitively. “Countdown Love” bucks and wallops in a Bob Bert like way, and “H Hour” has Collins’ distortion crusted, dirty, catchy mark on it, and “Very Next Songs” is equal parts mystic and rocking, as Kid Congo Powers often is. And yet, these songs sound more cohesive, more like each other, than on the previous album. It tastes like a good stew on the next day, all the flavors distinguishable but melded somehow. Could we dare to hope that Wolfmanhattan Project has turned from an occasional goof into an actual band?

Summer for Ever and Ever has its feel-good pop ragers (like the title track), its banging, raging, jungle-drumming pipedreams (“Respectable Pigs”), and its weird sound sculpted intervals (“New in the World” with its distended chords, its wandering piano and its dying rattlesnake tambourine)—that is, all the irregular pieces that made Blue Gene Stew, so fascinating. But the pieces fit together this time in a worn-in, practiced way.

You might look for wisdom from this trio of guys who’ve been at the rock endeavor for this long, and indeed, “Very Next Song,” contains a couplet that defines longevity in the arts or life or anything else. “We make the work…” chants Powers above a thrash of noisy guitar play and thundering beats, “And the work makes us.” Amen to that, and more of it.

The three principals are all legendary in a crusty, underground way. Colllins spliced electric blues to garage stomp in the Gories, then rifled through Motown, Detroit House and Bubblegum in the ever-entertaining Dirtbombs. Powers played a role in two of American punk’s defining outfits, first the Gun Club and then the Cramps; more recently he’s backed Nick Cave in the Bad Seeds and recorded a string of wonderfully warped, tripped out garage albums with the Pink Monkey Birds. Bert was Sonic Youth’s first drummer (before Steve Shelley), and he’s also played with the Chrome Cranks, Pussy Galore and Lydia Lunch’s Retrovirus. (Lunch turns up for a cameo in “Jar in the Staircase.”) That’s a lot of rock and roll history right there, but none of it weighs on their hard-knocking, rough-housing, just-out-of-true grooves. They play hard, with joy and eccentric intelligence right here, right now.

The three players take varying roles in different songs, with some of them sounding distinctly Monkey-Bird-ish and others recalling the Dirtbombs. “Now Now Now” has Powers singing lead, in his arch, theatrical way, while Collins cranks away at a serrated riff. “Smells Like You” puts Collins at the mic, with Powers strumming a rough, tangled mess of guitar. Bert sings from behind the kit on “Delay Is the Deadliest,” which runs hard and terse and stutter-y a la Bad Moon Rising-era Sonic Youth (which makes perfect sense). Powers’ “I Feel You” is a rockabilly rave-up, with a rollicky one-two beat and a bawdy slant (“It’s your legs/it’s your cock/it’s your wiggle when you walk”). Bert socks away at a cowbell through the song while space-age electro-squiggles arc off against the night sky.

And yet while all three of these guys are more than capable of cranking out short, catchy, perfectly accessible rock songs, there’s a vein of oddity that runs through this material, a Black Mirror-ish skew towards the surreal and the futuristic. The two closing songs are the trippiest. “Toynbee Tile Blues” unspools a tale of the mysterious ceramic tiles that started popping up in major U.S. cities in the 1980s, bearing the legend “Toynbee Idea/In Movie 2001/Ressurrect the Dead/On Planet Jupiter.” A voice altered-chant recounts this message and lists all the cities where these tiles have been found as Bert pummels out a samba-complex rhythm and whistling doppler-ing feedback rushes by. “Last Train to Babylon” begins in distended blues (Powers exclaims, “Dude, my mind is expanding”) before settling into a dreamy, kraut-rocking groove and Collins intones lyrics about flying saucers.

The whole thing is sort of bonkers, but how great is that? These three musicians could rest on their past accomplishments forever, making modest tweaks to what succeeded before, but instead they are going off on the weirdest possible space-trip ever. All hail the late career experiment.