Wolfmother + Wolf & Cub
Columbiahalle, Berlin

Tonight, our all-Oz lupine roadshow stops off to placate an army of sweaty Teutonic guitar tragics, aching to be proved right after years of bedroom seclusion. Wolf & Cub shuffle on and begin to sermonise under mostly green stage lights. In a skittish, bogan-approved tribute to mid-period Primal Scream, the lads struggle to keep it together through a haze of halting rhythms and the waft of audience expectation. They’re soon joined by Wolfmother’s Chris Ross who contributes completely inaudible keys to a paranoid rendition of ‘Vessels’, the opening cut on their recently 4AD-d LP. The metal-aping final breakdown does the business, however.

With the prefab quibbles buried under a deluge of Stateside success, Wolf Snr. appear to Bowie’s ‘Heroes’ and play ‘Dimension’, as they’ve done every second night for the past 6 months. The trio is reveling in post-Grammy stadium mode, Stockdale’s (now cordless) guitar having metastasised from the limpness of yore to something much, much scarier. The effect is such that even the most marginal of album cuts incites slow-motion slam dancing and unprompted clap-alongs. With flared, twitching nostrils our Supreme Leader engages in all manner of borrowed theatrics, while new dad Ross hammers tilting keyboards and, when required, incites the faithful with hard house-style fist pumps.

Half-way through Stockdale announces Wolfmother’s intention to “play jazz”, one of many references to himself, and the band, in the third person. They finish up with a technically excellent ‘Communication Breakdown’, prompting howls of recognition from the pit and satisfied grunts from their parents at the back. Stockdale erroneously tags the show as the last of their European tour, but this somehow seems like a triumphant finale, with a second album unlikely to recreate the same sense of nostalgia-drenched rapture underpinning these glory days for the band.

by Andrew Crook