The Warlocks - Surgery / 2005 Mute / 11 Tracks / http://www.thewarlocks.com / http://www.mute.com / Reviewed 13 September 2005

The dreamy pop played by The Warlocks allows listeners to sail off on puffy clouds of jangly guitars and smoky vocals. Tracks like “Thursday’s Radiation” mix flawlessly hints of Blur, Bowie and “Grave Dancers Union”-era Soul Asylum to create something that is a true mix of old and new, rock and indie. Perhaps most interesting about The Warlocks is their skillful incorporation of chaotic guitar lines that would make anyone in the psychedelic movement blush with envy.

Still, tracks like “Thursday’s Radiation” are brought back into The Warlock’s mailed fist with a talent and maturity that is hard to find in the current state of music. Tracks can push five, six, seven minutes and even go longer, because the overarching arrangements and instrumentation that confront listeners during a Warlocks track will never stale. In fact, “The Tangent” (beyond staying true to the same sort of quality that The Warlocks have throughout the disc) seems to draw in some current influence, having a disaffected, Steven Trask-like vocals domineer the track. Switching out the guitar for a synthesizer during “Above Earth”, the overall style of the track finds its way into an Ozzy meets The Beatles type of sound, a true slow dance song for the new millennium. The Warlocks spread out eleven tracks in about sixty minutes, a misleading length as the time spins by at such a rapid pace when “Surgery” is on that one will wonder why the disc is so fleeting. Mopving into the realm of swamp, Lynyrd Skynyrd-type guitar lines for the penultimate “Bleed Without You Babe”, The Warlock make something as compelling as “Tuesday’s Gone”, if it was sang by Rufus Wainwright.

“Come Save Us” uses a form of distortion that really brings listeners back to the days of hollow-sounding, Hippie-influenced goth rock, especially to the early days of Love Spirals Downward and Lycia. Incorporating so many different genres on “Surgery” means that The Warlocks succeed twice: first off, the band is able to play a song in X style, gain some fans and increase that base when they incorporate Y style into their general sound during the next track. Secondly, the band is shown to be proficient enough with their instruments to allow audiophiles the ability of listening in to this very pop-friendly music without feeling bad in any way. “Surgery” is a somewhat-fitting name for this album, as The Warlocks are able to precisely cut sections out of the corpus of popular music and stitch them into completely new positions.

Top Tracks: It’s Just Like Surgery, The Tempest

Rating: 6.4/10