Occasionally, a piece of music appears out of the ether, fully formed. The Wolves, the quietly remarkable debut LP from Melbourne outfit Brighter Later, is just such an album. Combining elements of psych-folk, dream pop, lo-fi-indie and alt-country, The Wolves is not so much an album but a world of its own, drawing us in with its ghostly strangeness, and the echoes of the familiar recast into something new.
To record the LP, Brighter Later took the DIY approach and set up in Kranz’s home, an old church in Melbourne’s west, with minimal gear and volumes of natural reverb. The decision to self-produce set Kranz on a steep learning curve, but ultimately allowed her to follow her intuition in bringing the songs to life, free of pre-meditated ideas about how the album would sound. Being a novice producer, “one of the advantages was not even having a rule book to throw out,” Kranz says.
Acclaimed first single, ‘The Woods’, begins with a sprightly, wordless chant before retreating into a stately mid-section, Kranz coaxing out gorgeous hooks over a pared back arrangement that builds to a luminous finale.
Second single ‘Come and Go’ brims with elegant melody, swinging from aching, unhurried pastoralia to rousing, hazy swoon. ‘All the Great Lakes’ is Brighter Later at their most epic, Kranz’s silvery voice emerging above a bed of gauzy harmonies, synths and reverbed guitar to gently devastating effect.
Mixed by Andy Stewart (Gotye, Paul Kelly, CW Stoneking), The Wolves features contributions from Alex Landgragin, along with guest turns by Pony Face’s Simon Bailey, ARIA-winning producer Shane O’Mara, Cameron Potts (Cuba is Japan, Ninetynine) and engineer Casey Rice (Dirty Three).
The ten spellbinding tracks recall certain music antecedents – the breathy spell of early Cat Power, the haunting, narcotic beauty of Low – while sounding only like themselves. On The Wolves, Brighter Later have created a sound that is entirely their own – one that’s all the more haunting for appearing, more or less, out of the great black night.
Brighter Later Album Launch
March 24th
Northcote Social Club
With Special Guests
www.northcotesocialclub.com
