Wolf & Cub - Science And Sorcery

It’s more than two years since Wolf & Cub broke cover with their debut album Vessels. Those two years seemed to take on a momentum of their own. The album was released around the globe and the band found themselves playing in Japan, Europe, the UK and the USA and touring Australia with TV On The Radio, The Killers, Queens of the Stone Age, Wolfmother and Primal Scream.

At some point the breaks had to be applied, battered road cases stored away and thoughts focused on future sounds. Given the restlessness at the core of Wolf & Cub’s creativity there was never any chance things would be done the same way a second time. New influences, new gear, new ideas necessitate a new approach.

Most immediate differences were guitarist/singer Joel Byrne crash landing in Canberra rather than the band’s hometown of Adelaide, where his band mates Joel Carey and Thomas Mayhew were still based. Marvin Hammond had also joined the band, extending their sound pallet on sax, guitar, percussion and piano.

The band also decided to work on new material with a producer, someone to challenge their assumptions, thrown up contrary perceptions and push their nerdy ideas into a new part of the stratosphere.

When the idea of working with Chris Colonna (aka Bumblebeez) was originally floated it was shrugged off as too left of field even by the band’s standards. Chris’ hip-hop cut & paste production style seemed an odd fit and worse still there was a concern that everything could go tragically wrong and the band emerge as a 80s derived synth pop outfit.

However they were intrigued enough to make the trek out to Chris’ studio in his hometown of Braidwood in the southern tablelands of NSW, to work on a track they had previously demoed. And that’s where Science & Sorcery began. What had originally concerned the band now inspire them, there was an energy in Chris’ take on their music that they could feed off the excitement in operating outside their comfort zone.

And even though they beamed in from different parts of the music world there were also points of connection. Braidwood is a quiet little place (pop 1108) an hour from anywhere, where people are just passing through. Just like Port Augusta where Joel and Tommy grew up: secluded, devoid of outside influences and distractions and a perfect place to focus on the thoughts in your head and create music.

Existing demos were built on, disassembled, reconstructed, sidelined, rediscovered and reassembled. New material was built from the ground up. During the early stages nothing was considered stable, everything had the possibility to change, evolve, disappear and be reborn. Through this process the body of work that constitutes Science & Sorcery eventually took form.

Joel captures the whole experience when he says; “We never attempted to alter the outcome, ‘our sound’ or the songs that make up the album, but there was a conscience effort to change the procedure that created the outcome. I’ll leave it up to others to decide if the sound has gone anywhere else, because I don’t know where it was before. It’s still Wolf & Cub, just another piece of the puzzle.”