The eggo has landed. Well, not really. It’s sort of just suspended there – cosmically – like a giant Kinder Surprise while a half-naked kid standing in crop circles looks on in disbelief. This is the kind of cover art thousands of recoupable marketing dollars buys you when you choose to name your album Cosmic Egg.

The second Wolfmother LP will be dropped on local audiences through Modular on October 9. But until then you’ll have to live with first single ‘New Moon Rising’, a self-described “ripping slice of optimistic future-blues”, which premiered on triple j yesterday (August 13).

Mess+Noise got a chance to preview the album at an “industry only” airing at Sing Sing Studios in the made-up Melbourne suburb of “Cremorne” (aka Richmond) earlier this week. We may have been there for the promise of a free lunch, but we still managed to take in a few tracks between grapefruit cocktails and bite-sized salami pizette.

On first impressions – and this may surprise those who had ‘em pegged as nothing more than a ’70s tribute act – Cosmic Egg is very much a record of its time; a bombastic Pro Tools epic, spit polished and gentrified by Alan Moulder (Nine Inch Nails, A Perfect Circle) to within an inch of its life. It’s got more in common with the slick studio aesthetic of Soundgarden’s Badmotorfinger than the psychedelic murk of Led Zep, Sabbath or Blue Cheer.

With founding members Chris Ross and Myles Heskett out of the picture, Wolfmother Phase II – Aidan Nemeth (guitar), Ian Peres (bass/keys) and Dave Atkins (drums) – is little more than a foil for Andrew Stockdale’s guitar wank dreams. The riffs are massive and dense, solos are plentiful and note-heavy, and the octave pedal gets a decent workout too (it sounds as if Jack White, not Slash, has guested on most of these tracks).

Obvious singles include ‘White Feather’, a jaunty pop ditty with mythology-free lyrics (“I can’t compete/With your dancing feet”); the Dead Meadow-aping ‘Pilgrim’; ‘In The Morning’ with a middle-eight that recalls their own ‘White Unicorn’; and ‘Far Away’, a generic Triple M ballad seemingly tailor-made for the season finale of Packed to the Rafters.

Unlike Jet’s sophomore slump Shine On, Stockdale and the new Wolfmother have kept their eyes on the multi-platinum prize by leaving the ’70s shtick to labelmates Tame Impala and forging ahead with a pompous mod-rock sound. It’ll sell millions that’s for sure, but we all know what happened to the goose that laid the golden egg.

Tracklisting:

1.  California Queen
2.  New Moon Rising
3.  White Feather
4.  Sundial
5.  In The Morning
6.  10,000 Feet
7.  Cosmic Egg
8.  Far Away
9.  Pilgrim
10.  In The Castle
11.  Phoenix
12.  Violence Of The Sun

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