I’m less interested in the fact Alexander Wildwood opened for Manc yawnmongers Elbow on a recent tour of NZ than I am the tile of his EP, which is lifted from a collection of short stories by Charles Bukowski first published in 1973. Buk may have become a cool name to drop in the last decade or so, but when I started reading him 20 or so years ago he was languishing in a place where he was neither critically acclaimed nor cultishly cred. ‘Post Office’ and ‘Factotum’ struck me as magnificently raw and Buk’s voice and narrative style was powerful in its directness and lack of pretence.
Wildwood, standing in long grass in a biker jacket that looks suspiciously new or wearing a bow tie and smoking a pipe in the promo shots that accompany this, his debut EP, looks like he’s trying hard to be rebellious and alternative, but there’s nothing biting, gritty or pungent about the five ebullient, anthemic pop songs on this EP. There’s no sense of struggle, no sense of dislocation or displacement: instead, we’re given a warm, cozy serving of affirmation. While there’s nothing fundamentally wrong with Wildwood’s well-produced and grandiose tunes, there’s nothing especially distinctive about them either, and certainly nothing that comes close to fulfilling the title’s promise.
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