Review & Full Album Premiere: Wo Fat, The Singularity
[Click play above to stream Wo Fat’s The Singularity in full. Album is out Friday on Ripple Music.]
The first several minutes of Wo Fat‘s “Orphans of the Singe” are dedicated to putting the listener back into the band’s particular otherworldly swamp. Atmospheric guitar and bass, far back but tense tom runs and a generally hazy air permeate the build into the percussion-laced, 13:55 opener’s true boogie. Thus it is that the Dallas, Texas-based here-trio set the stage for their seventh studio full-length, The Singularity, also their second album for Ripple Music and their first offering in the six years since 2016’s Midnight Cometh (review here), though a good chunk of that time was spent on tour.
Between the firebreathing robot dragon on the album art and the rising flood waters beneath it, it’s hard to know precisely which apocalypse they’re referring to — one suspects hints of others are strewn about the intricate details of the piece — but suffice it to say there are plenty to choose from and the post-jam harmonized vocal hook that emerges amid the crashing cymbals and telltale fuzzy shred in that first track, “Truth is rebellion/In a land of illusion,” the band haven’t been blind to the goings on over the last half-decade-plus in their home country.
The Singularity comprises seven songs and runs a CD-limit-testing 75 minutes — a definitive double-LP — and it reassures familiar aspects of who Wo Fat are in terms of sound and style while furthering the path of growth that’s made them one of their generation’s most rightly-appreciated bands. The fuzz, funk and solo work of guitarist/vocalist Kent Stump and the crash and thud — the latter particularly in stomping highlight second cut “The Snows of Banquo IV,” which is outright heavier than Wo Fat have ever been — of Michael Walter‘s drums, and the steady low-end carry of Zack Busby‘s basslines assure that as far out as they might go on an extended piece like the leadoff or “Overworlder” (11:55), with its psychedelic flourish of swirling effects later on, the more chug-motoring “The Witching Chamber” (9:25) and the sum-it-all-up-and-make-it-go-further closer “The Oracle,” which brings more melodic complexity to its instrumentalism close to the album’s finish as if to hint that there’s still more ground for them to cover, they are not without an underlying sense of structure.
Memorable choruses are nothing new to Wo Fat, as their catalog reissues over the last year-plus have duly asserted for anyone who might’ve missed out the first time, but the key to what they do is in the balance between crafted, riff-based, blues-minded, swamp-stank heavy rock and roll, jazz-informed jams, and a sense that the party you’re having might just be the last one you get before the whole thing — i.e. the universe — comes crashing down on itself.
In mood, this is the crux of The Singularity. “The Witching Chamber,” “Overworlder” — which picks right up where “The Snows of Banquo IV” leave off and makes its way toward its own genuinely exciting crescendo — and the telling riff-slappy centerpiece “The Unraveling” (again, maybe of everything) do not fail and do not cease to engage. And the darker thematic is hardly new for Wo Fat either. Hell, their first record in 2006 was literally called The Gathering Dark, so yes, that is a recognizable element, even if one more complex in its presentation now than it was those 16 years ago.
The swamp may still be haunted, but with different ghosts, in other words, though a cut like “The Witching Chamber” is about as classic Wo Fat as one might get, from its hypnotic intro answering back “Orphans of the Singe” to the manner in which its verse seems to emerge from the murk of its own devise to joy they make it to follow along with the groove that takes hold from there until the final bits of rumblefuzz fade into the crashing start of the title-track, the band clearly aware of each song’s effect on the audience and the way in which they want their songs to flow across the album’s extended span. It is no minor feat to put together a 75-minute 2LP and have it lock in its audience for the duration. This is ultimately why Wo Fat are the kind of band from whom one might spend six years looking forward to a new record.
With Stump (who also donates some electric piano in the sonic hithers and yons) and Walter (whose off-kit percussive contributions are no less integral) as the founding core of the band — also co-owners of Crystal Clear Sound in Dallas, where The Singularity was made — Wo Fat are masters of their sound, however they might seek to push themselves creatively in any given track. The swinging procession and scorch of the title-track demonstrates this as plainly as the rest of what surrounds, if perhaps in somewhat condensed form compared to “Overworlder” or “Orphans of the Singe,” etc., and the shifts the band pulls off between one song and the next, the feeling they bring to their jams — not lazy or purely exploratory; there’s a plot and a basic forward idea, but they’re ready to meander en route back to where they came from — isn’t to be understated.
There’s consciousness in “The Singularity” as though the band were functioning as one of the coherent thinking machines the lyrics describe, and the development of that can be traced back at least over the last decade of their work. The Singularity is comforting in some contrast to the grim thematic in that the songs themselves reaffirm the band’s modus, of which progression is an integral part. If the world is ending — and the only reason it wouldn’t be is because it already happened — then at least we got one more Wo Fat album out of the deal.
Whatever they do next will inherently find their dynamic somewhat shifted, as Busby is out of the group and Patrick Smith has joined in his place, along with Matt Watkins, who played on the aforementioned The Gathering Dark, rejoining on second guitar — the acquisition of which makes more sense in the context of the dual leads at the culmination of the title-track, as well as in the farthest-out spaces of “The Oracle” subsequent — but Wo Fat, now a veteran act at the vanguard of Texas and broader American heavy rock, will hopefully continue to thrive, explore, and harness their processes as they do here. Any shape their future might take, they leave no question that it will be theirs.
I cannot stop listening to this album, it’s amazing. I can see this and Earthless fighting it out for top spot on my end-of-year rankings. Thanks for premiering it, it’s likely I would have missed it otherwise.