You can’t thow a stick these days without hitting a band that says they bend genres into a potent stew of original sound that sets them apart from everybody else. At this point, it’s almost cliche. BUT . . . Santa Cruz, California’s Wolf Jett smashes that cliche to bits with their masterful command of not just different styles but how they bring those styles of music together. The secret is their musicianship and the respect they hold for not only those who influenced them but also the music they make now. Their latest release, Time Will Finally Come is our case in point.
If we dig into the lyrics on this one, we find a not-so-subtle message of rebirth. To understand that message, one must understand the crushing adversity this band has bested over the last four years. In August 2020, still very much in the grips of a global pandemic, a massive lightning storm slammed into Santa Cruz Mountains, touching off catastrophic fires that would burn for a month and displace thousands. Drummer Jon Payne’s home and the band’s studio sat in the fire’s path.
Like so many folks, Jon and his wife were forced to evacuate as the flames raged closer and closer to his idyllic mountain property. In less than forty-eight hours, everything was gone. The house, the studio, the instruments, it was all ash. This record, then, is truly a phoenix rising from the ashes project. In an amazing display of intrepidity, Jon and his community rapidly began the process of cleaning up and rebuilding their lives and, in the case of Wolf Jett, their studio as well. Four years later, the band gets to call their old home their new home.
While they found themselves homeless, the band picked up the pieces by embracing their music and committing it to tape. The power of the dynamic vocal duo of frontman Chris Jones and Laura T. Lewis immediately commands the listener’s ear; those harmonies duck and dodge through punctuating and burning instrumentation. Jones’ at times fierce guitar work kicks through incredible organ work by both Jason Crosby and Alex Jordan who provide sweeping and emphatic swirls of sound that must be heard to be understood. Under it all, the engine of the thing is Payne’s pounding, steady-as-a-rock backbeat.
This album’s value reaches beyond warm and soulful vocals and the snarls that scrape out beyond blues riffs that would be right at home in an angsty Mississippi juke joint. But then they drop the funk by incorporating Funkadelic’s “Hit It and Quit It” right in the middle of their own “Feel the Way I Feel”. They don’t even try to hide it; it’s a straight cop, unapologetically invoking and celebrating the power of Funkadelic. It is an exclamation point that does not look back but forward. Wolf Jett incorporates the riff to pay some homage while at the same time accentuating their work. Therein is the real power of this band. They know how to mix it up, drop all the stuff they love in a blender, and create a thing that flies.
Wolf Jett has found the space to not recycle but reassemble sounds that make them fresh and unique again, and this compels us to sit with the record and wonder what could come next. And for a band hungry for more miles on the road and more hours in a studio, they are just getting started. Their live show is relentless – a barrage of prowess and power that will have you planning the next time you can see them as you walk to your car at the night’s end.
In the end, this is the band coming out of Santa Cruz that stands to make a real mark on the industry. They picked themselves up, dusted themselves off, and did the work, and now they get to take a breath and be proud.
