Off the back of two great EPs, it would have been easy to excuse Wolf Alice for using a few of those tracks to their début LP My Love Is Cool. So the fact that even breakout hit ‘Moaning Lisa Smile’ doesn’t appear on the record is an achievement. Almost all of the songs on My Love Is Cool live up to it and then some.
Like the band’s name, the album is a strangely perfect blend of precious humanity and wild rock. Ellie Rowsell’s vocals bring the emotion, as opening track ‘Turn To Dust’ holds the listener in the palm of its hand. They take their time to lull you into security with the shoegaze influenced ‘Bros’ and the more typical (yet no less wonderful) indie rock thrills of ‘Your Love’s Whore’. And then the animal comes out to play with ‘You’re a Germ’, from which point there is no more containing the album’s eccentricities.
For all the musical diversity, their lyrics give the album instantly identifiable themes: unrequited loves, not liking your home town (on the album’s highlight ‘Giant Peach’), total creeps’ relationships with family members, anxiety, and the odd existential crisis. In a way it’s the perfect emo album: for sitting in silence and for screaming in defiance; that label is way too dismissive of the band’s great musical talent however. That, more than anything else, is what makes it stand out as one of the best of the year.
My Love Is Cool was released on 22nd June via Dirty Hit.
