Album Review

Kurran And The Wolfnotes – Your Four Limbs

• 19th Aug 2010

Folk’ is an appellation that gets bandied about a lot these days. A label that gets stuck onto any band that wears plaid shirts and doesn’t plug in their guitars. And if you do plug in some guitars and perhaps have one or two tattoos you’re alt-folk. Or nu-folk. In the UK, of course, you’re Brit folk. Folk’s cool these days, apparently.

Frankly though, if you have a voice like chocolate-flavoured vodka and sing about how you long for my four limbs “and long to sleep amongst their bends” you could be electric-tamborine-beardy-prog-folk for all I care, I’d still give you a listen.

Kurran and the Wolfnotes are a five-piece mainly British band (singer Kurran Karbal’s from New York) riding the wave of folk appreciation with their second single ‘Your Four Limbs’. But unlike the chart-topping ballads from the likes of Mumford & Sons, this music is not so self-consciously, obviously traditional. There are folk influences there, definitely (twangs of Neil Young, for example), but Kurran’s songs are sharper and more sophisticatedly urban than their country-dwelling cider-drinking peers.

Like the band’s first single, ‘Whatabitch’, the lyrics in ‘Your Four Limbs’ are direct, colloquial and feel very much of their time. And of their place. No references to lockets, sailors, horses or hayfields of any description here. When Kurran writes about heartbreak, he writes honestly about dumped in a city in 2010.

And if ‘Your Four Limbs’ is folk, it’s slick folk. Lovely layers of complex sound, with satisfyingly intricate and complementary guitar riffs. All topped by a melody and harmonies that manage to be upbeat and lilting while also a bit deep and dark. This is not at all quaint. It has an edge. It’s bittersweet.

Your Four Limbs is out on September 13, and Kurran and the Wolfnotes are touring the UK in September.