Pitchfork

With their Adelaide address, bong-rattling basslines, occasionally mystical lyrical tendencies, and, of course, lupine-derived moniker, Wolf and Cub will draw comparisons to fellow Aussie metalheads Wolfmother. And while the band's first full-length Vessels certainly betrays a shared unironic affinity for the stoner-metal triumvirate of Blue Cheer, Black Sabbath and Vanilla Fudge, Wolf and Cub more often than not engage in a different sort of role-play.

The nearly seven-minute title track that opens Vessels effectively sets the stage for the remainder of the record. Swirling guitar feedback and bass that rumbles like an underground explosion hover around primevally pounded drums, tambourine, and the vocals of Joel Byrne, who sounds like a pained Marc Bolan struggling to make sense of his surroundings. If this description conjures Black Rebel Motorcycle Club, it should. Like their San Francisco-based brothers in arms, Wolf and Cub are indebted to an imagined version of 1960s West Coast hippie mysticism. More specifically, the group seems to have walked through the looking glass of a 1968 Bill Graham Fillmore West concert poster and have yet to re-emerge.

Vessels is loaded with revved-up, thunderous yowls that would make a fine soundtrack for any number of D&D-inspired video games; sweat-soaked instrumental "Rozalia Bizarre" echoes the Amboy Dukes' 1968 B-movie rumble "Journey to the Center of Your Mind", while "March of Clouds", "This Mess", and "Seeds of Doubt" nail down the band's mind-numbing pattern of power drill psych-metal. That the songs are essentially interchangeable 8-cylinder rawk is one thing; that they begin to clearly resemble the long-forgotten, acid-coated Eastern-revivalists Kula Shaker is something more distressing altogether. A generic lavender haze coats much of Vessels, and the band seems fine to reside in the same exotic sky castle as the Brit Pop casualty.

A brief hint of better things to come for the band lies late in the record, as shape-shifting instrumental "Conundrum" suggests the band has a fuzzy idea of something more interesting to do with psychedelic atmospherics. A sinuous, dark piano line writhes its way through the howling feedback, suggesting a jazzy, mysterious undercurrent not too dissimilar from Traffic's "The Low Spark of High-Heeled Boys". That song's title and preternatural level of mellowness invokes a spirit of fashionable-yet-casual rebelliousness that is perhaps impossible to realize, yet one that Wolf and Cub might do well to strive toward.