TRACK REVIEW: St. Wolf - Gary Vince
St. Wolf is a Manila-based four piece “swabecore” band, a term they had personally coined to set apart their groovy hard rock band writing about love from hundreds of other groovy hard rock bands writing about love. Perusing beyond the self-appointed term, one can easily see that the band brings nothing new to the table: the same “OPM” based hard rock sound appended with tired blues-based riffs. However, the energy St. Wolf delivers in their live performances is commendable, where the songs acquire a certain degree of life. Gary Vince is often considered a highlight in their live shows, a song that has proven to win over the crowd multiple times. Similar to Mundo by IV of Spades, Gary Vince is a live song their fans badly wanted a studio version of. And just like Mundo, the studio version of Gary Vince was a disappointment.
Right off the bat, the vocal delivery and guitar are noticeably more sterile in comparison to their live iteration. The apathetic delivery of the vocalist is a testament to the banality of the lyrics, each line sounds as if they were being read off a script written by a bot that auto-generates brokenhearted sentiments in Filipino. Because of this, any forward momentum in the song is greatly hampered. It also doesn’t help that the instrumentation and production features several questionable moments. Building upon the use of the term “questionable”, the song fluctuates in two states: when it isn’t retreading sounds and ideas that have been done to death, it features passages and small moments that raises the question of why it was included in the final mix. It’s those small details stacked together that brought down the quality of the song in my eyes.
Nitpicking in a song happens when the ones the listener picks out, when put together, help to explain why they fail to enjoy said song. For example, the instrumental melody at the first minute mark is a good idea if only it wasn’t layered with what sounds like a summery synth tone replicating the guitar line, making the entire passage sound tacky. Around 1:30 in the song, the vocalist attempts to emphasize the final syllable of the line by raising it a few notes in a shouted manner. He fails to execute this however, with that attempt at emphasis failing to express any emotion. Perhaps the worst moment is the aggressive shift from 1:45 to 2:05. Signaled by a cringe-inducing quarter note count typical of rock music, the voice used is jarring enough to cause me to stop listening to this track. This is then followed by the only redeeming moment of the song, a falsetto delivery layered with a few vocals, harmonizing above a passing guitar lick to create a nice soundscape. As soon as the instruments return in full force, the magic dissipates making way for reality: that segment is the best thing St. Wolf has done so far, due to the fact that it’s the least “St. Wolf”-sounding segment.
This was a dull, disappointing track, mostly due to the faults of vocal delivery and production. It’s a shame, what happened to excellent tracks like Mundo and Gary Vince. Excellent ideas and writing marred by bad sound and production choices, and the alluring trap of accessibility. Most of the changes done to the aforementioned tracks were done with mass appeal in mind, muting the magic contained within. I recommend to watch St Wolf play Gary Vince live instead, they put on a good show worthy of this song.
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