Bringing in psychedelic sounds rattling and growling from a lion’s cage WAWAWOW unleash a mesh of raunchy guitar drizzle and blossoming synths in their debut album Pink Elephant.
If you’re thinking of searching for another Aussie band that sounds similar to Pyschedlic Porn Crumpets or King Gizzard and The Lizard Wizard then WAWAWOW is straight up your alley.
There is an undercurrent of WAWAWOW’s influences in their debut like the B-52s, Talking Heads, and Queens Of The Stone Age. In combining their influences into their own sound, the band herald themselves, ‘half jam, half Tetris’. In fusing electro and pysch-rock madness in such songs like ‘Elephant Bird’ and ‘Vanilda’, WAWAWOW are manipulating sounds from every corner of the sonic spectrum. Immensely imaginative, the Sydney four piece are a unit that thrive on each other’s creative energy.
“We wanted to find a way to capture the very first jams that we cut together and use them, rather than try later and fail to get the spark,” said WAWAWOW.
Pink Elephant – A Psychedelic Circus Of Surprise And Wonder
Intro song ‘Pink’ straps in fast and kicks off the 13 track behemoth. What follows next is a kaleidoscopic vortex that pulls listeners into the band’s essence of psychedelic experimentation. The roller coaster really takes off in the fast guitar riffing track ‘Girls’.
Pink Elephant shows the band’s mischievous personality in surprising the listener. You are not sure what comes next. Each track flows thoroughly in association of each other and it feels as if there is a flowing of time passing from one song to the next. Essentially, the album feels like a sequential stream of consciousness. Each song follows off one after the other and explodes in unexpected magical turns in musical arrangement.
I can imagine the characters of the film Trainspotting rioting around and causing shenanigans on the track ‘Yesterday’. Wade Van Den Hoek’s smearing vocals weaves in and out of the distorted guitars. The song on a whole is indulgent and hysterical as it paints representations of paranoia and confusion.
‘Rat Porridge’ would be their most raunchiest rocking tune on the album that distinctly shows the originality of the band. The song showcases the surrealist lyrical imagery, and the catchy synth hooks that seep into guitar fuzziness.
‘The Big Cookoff’ was the band’s perspective about Sydney’s suffocation as a city. The song introduces a melancholy radio-esque voice over explaining urban modernisation. The song then explodes in a psychedelic jive of ridicule and hypnotism. The band phrase their time signatures with different rhythms from fast to slow to fast as if you were on a crazy train ride.
In listening deeply into the song, the band’s correlation is ecstatically tight and their knowledge of instrumentation gives a feeling that is galvanizing and pure. ‘The Big Cookoff’ shows the band is serious business, and how wonderful they stimulate a psychedelic instrumentation as a collective body which explores their sensibilities living in Sydney. The band check into sounds that invoke Sydney’s good, the bad and the ugly all cooking together in one big melting stew.
The music video was created by animator Shaun Allen and shot collaboratively by the band. The video shows snippets of Newtown, and the juxtaposition of Sydney’s CBD, the suburbs of the inner west, beach cliffs and motorways.
“This track is our love/hate letter to Sydney in a lot of ways, so we wanted to get in as much of the city as possible. We then used stop motion animation to create the dark but cartoonish version of the city that matched the ridiculousness of the music,” said WAWAWOW.
The song introduces a melancholy radio voice over explaining urban modernisation and explodes into a psychedelic jive of ridicule and hypnotism. The song phrases itself with fast rhythms as if you were on a crazy train ride.
Listen To Pink Elephant below:
WAWAWOW has gifted 2020 with an indie, psychedelic infused rock gem in their debut album, Pink Elephant. They will be launching their album debut this Saturday, February 22nd at the Town Hall Hotel in Newtown with supporting acts Pyjama Sundayz, and Cakewalk.
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