After the whirlwind journey the band went on with the Wolfmother album, a voyage that resulted in over one million sales, sold out riots disguised as shows the world over, multiple ARIA Awards and a Grammy, the time has arrived to break the self-imposed silence.
Wolfmother has emerged from the Sunset Boulevard studio it called home for the first half of 2009 into the blinding sunlight of a brand new day with a thundering 2nd record, Cosmic Egg.
This regal cacophony is a record that’s at once a darker shade of night at one end of the sonic spectrum and a euphoric light of day at the other. Every colour in between is a vivid tone on the kaleidoscopic palette that Wolfmother have drawn from on this, their sophomore broadcast.
Cosmic Egg bolts the gamut from New Moon Rising to the open road riffing of California Queen, from the thumping groove of Fields to the heaving sludge of 10,000 Feet and back via the Rhodes-led lament of Far Away. The title track sounds like the kind of carefree goodtime you’d have hoped for from Wolfmother II, while Phoenix too echoes of the debut record whilst sounding wonderfully reinvigorated.
The title Cosmic Egg relates to the age-old black hole theory of optimism, wherein the implosion of a star doesn’t instigate a disappearance or destruction, rather a new beginning of a new universe.
The seeds for Cosmic Egg were sown when the touring cycle for the triumphant debut record came to a close, and frontman and guitarist Andrew Stockdale sat down to start from scratch at his home studio in Brisbane. The songs themselves that comprise the record came together from different times and places, geographically, mentally – ‘some of the songs were written rather spontaneously during the last 2 weeks of tracking, some have been floating around in one form or another for 2 years.’
Following this extensive gestation period and the enlistment of new band members, Stockdale and co, with producer Alan Moulder, travelled to Byron Bay, Australia, to begin pre-production. Byron served as a makeshift spiritual home for Cosmic Egg, and according to Stockdale, ‘served well for creative purposes, for the writing and rewriting the songs it was the perfect place to be.’
Moulder meanwhile brought a giant hessian sack of worldly producer experience to the table, filled of milestone works from the likes of My Bloody Valentine, The Smashing Pumpkins, Ride and Nine Inch Nails. Stockdale laments ‘he was, and is, one of the factors I’m most excited about when it comes to this record. I guess we connected creatively, and he’s just made the album sound fantastic, incredible, warm, heavy, tasteful, formidable. If nothing else, whatever happens at least I can say”.this record sounds superb. And he’s got a way of doing that.’
From there the process transplanted to Los Angeles for recording proper to commence, a location that added another dimension of rich experience to Cosmic Egg, and the perfect place to make magic from one’s own mind, a fact concisely reinforced in the resultant 50-odd minute suite.
Cosmic Egg is, in short, the sound of the Wolfmother world being rethunk and cracked wide open, with a sprawling, jubilant galaxy of musical and metaphysical harmony spilling forth. Expedition is welcome to all.
‘Wolfmother was never like this huge plan to take over the world or anything, ‘let’s write the hugest songs in the world’ and that kind of thing, but it was definitely like ‘ok let’s try and impress 12 people, now let’s try and impress 50 people, then 100 people, then 200 people and so on’. Now, with Cosmic Egg, I’ve done my job to an extent, it’s in the hands of the listener.’
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