The Clearing
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WOLF ALICE – THE CLEARINg – Album Review
There can be no denying that ‘The Clearing’ is a big album for Wolf Alice. The band have already delivered three magnificent albums, they’ve pushed themselves to finally be playing arenas, and it happens to be their first on their new major label.
Plenty of pressure then and lots of eyes on the band to see what they do next. They also happen to be entering the phase of their career where people will be declaring that the honeymoon is over whilst looking for reasons to shoot them down.
The bonkers but utterly brilliant lead single, ‘Bloom Baby Bloom’ certainly got pulses racing for this fourth album and with that track sat at number two on the tracklist it really does serve as the centrepiece for this record.
From thereon in it’s a mixture of the weird and the wonderful. The high production values of Greg Kurstin are both a blessing and a curse as the record sounds big and bold but lacks that chaotic element that helped give Wolf Alice their unique identity.
WATCH THE VIDEO FOR ‘BLOOM BABY BLOOM’
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This after all is a band that have majestically straddled multiple musical worlds and sadly some of that is lost on ‘The Clearing’. Instead, the influences are pretty centric to the likes of Fleetwood Mac, ELO and latter-day Beatles.
The good thing is that the band are very clearly phenomenally talented, and the incredible vocal powers of Ellie Rowsell are undeniable. You cannot fault their ambition and their confidence in delivering this immersive collection of pop rock earworms.
This is an expansive album that grows with each listen and whilst it likely won’t garner the levels of acclaim reached by their previous releases, it absolutely keeps the intrigue and captivation of their aura intact.
This is a band clearly destined to dominate the landscape for the coming decades and ‘The Clearing’ is another stunning monolith created purely to generate mystique and intrigue.
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