Liverpool Sound and Vision Rating * * * *
If you can remember the 60s then as saying goes, you can’t have been there. You can’t have seduced by the sound that ensnared a generation and made the smallest hairs on their arms spring to attention as if a thousand watts of electricity had been pumped through every individual strand. Of course if you were born after the 60s and have had to make do with the stories of those who professed to having been at Candlestick Park, the Isle of Wight and the other hundreds of magic moments in which the 60s music hung round and the highlighted sores on society they captured.
The World of The Wooltones by Rob Clarke and The Wooltones makes up for that biological mistake of having been born into a world where Disco reigned supreme, where Punk was a sudden gorgeous dip into the unknown and where the first great adventure of Progressive Rock was dying slowly on a stage somewhere north of Cambridge. The haze of the chords shining like a rainbow through the dying embers of mist, the West Coast sound wrapped up in a Mersey coloured sheet, the haze one really enjoys living through.
Rob Clarke and The Wooltones’ first full journey in to an album is creatively enduring, the type of prolific beast that would have had so called hipsters rubbing their hands with glee supplied from the world’s glee farm, in fact glee could well have been an endangered species if farmed to exhaustion on the back of demand from having listened to The World of The Wooltones. Liverpool certainly would have run out of this commodity and would have jeopardized several species of Beetle along the way.
The tracks that make up The World of The Wooltones scream Scouse psychedelic, they behave with extraordinary alertness and whilst the era may not do a lot for you if you grew up on television executives telling you what to buy next then at least you can just tempt your soul once and come and play in a pen that was grown organically and with spontaneous but subtle sprinklings of Mersey water.
Rob Clarke, Pepe Hoonose, Sam Rogerson and GP Chesters combine so well in this area that songs such as Colours of the Sun, Our Business, the fantastic Monkey Mind, Mystic Room and Are You Wooltoned? rise out of the corporate swamps festering the mundane and offers instead a chance to see the world through eyes opened by comforting wool.
The World of The Wooltones is a great piece of work in the realms that was framed by a past generation and is now in the capable hands of the 21st Century. Psychedelic it may be but mind altering through taking a chance on the exuberant gives it a perspective and a focus for those who are happy to see music experimented with and not a constant pattern which leads to the dull and tedious.
Ian D. Hall