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Review & Video Premiere: Wight, Spank the World

Posted in Bootleg Theater, Reviews on April 10th, 2020 by JJ Koczan

Wight Spank The World

German heavy psych-funk rockers Wight release their new album, Spank the World, on April 24 through Kozmik Artifactz and Fat and Holy Records. Let it suffice to say that Spank the World is the funkdoobiest, trippiest, soul-drippingest apocalyptic sci-fi heavy psych epic you’re going to hear this year, and the fact that it’s likely also the only one you’re going to hear this year has very, very little to do with that. Based in Darmstadt and working as a more involved four-piece with percussionist Steffen Kirchpfening having become more ingrained as a part of the band since joining after most of the skeletal writing for 2016’s Love is Not Only What You Know (review here), Wight moves guitarist/vocalist/key-specialist and directional figurehead René Hofmann into the role of producer as well, tracking over the course of most of last year even as his Wasted Life Studio was being built to completion.

And Spank the World, though it runs a tidy 10 songs and 40 minutes, would not seem to have been a minor undertaking in terms of recording aspirations. Even putting aside the rhythmic complexities brought to bear by Kirchpfening and drummer Thomas Kurek and the shifts in prominence between Hofmann‘s guitar and various keys — organ, clavinet, synthesizers, samplers, etc. (Kirchpfening contributes in this regard as well) — and the swaps between fretted and fretless bass from Peter-Philipp Schierhorn, the guest spots of violin on post-intro opener “Hot,” sax, trombone and trumpet on “Nervous” and “Island in the Sun,” and yes, baritone oud on the three-part pre-outro closer “Bon Apocalypso,” all make for Wight‘s most sonically complex offering to-date, having grown out of the stoner-fuzz beginnings of 2011’s Wight Weedy Wight (review here) and into more psychedelic fare on 2012’s quick-turnaround follow-up, Through the Woods into Deep Water (review here), before restructuring the lineup and bringing in Kirchpfening as a fourth member.

The shift in direction toward broader arrangements seemed at the time to have necessitated that move, and listening to Spank the World, it makes even more sense. Songs like “Island in the Sun,” or the disco-funk tripper “Spiritual Gangster” — a quick instrumental that follows “Hot” and nonetheless serves as more than an interlude in transitioning between the album’s first single and “Nervous” and Motorgroove,” which follow in succession — have a sonic breadth to them that, well, probably would’ve taken much longer than a year to record, even if the three of them had managed to come up with all the same ideas that having a fourth person as a part of the process allowed them to explore. That of course is to say nothing of the aforementioned guest appearances on strings and horns, or the added background vocals, elements of gang shouts, and general twists of mood that come to fruition in the songs themselves, be it the bound-to-be-a-follow-up-single “Time’s Up” on side B or the seven-minute “Bon Apocalypso” itself, which is a somewhat pieced-together freakout jam, less psych than “Motorgroove” at the end of side A, but still flowing and progressive in the finished product. One way or another, people, it all gets pretty wild.

Wight (Photo by Jan Ehlers)

And there’s no doubt left as to that being the band’s precise intent, but that doesn’t mean the songs themselves are haphazard. After “Intro” sets up the rest of what’s to come with synth and various other elements and the robot-voice spoken word of, indeed, ‘The Robot’s Sermon,’ promising a funky end of the world to come, and that’s exactly how the narrative is framed, even as “Hot” — tagged in the liner notes with the line ‘Global Warming’s Not the Only Thing Heating Me Up!’ — and “Nervous” and “Time’s Up” could be just as easily regarded as relationship pieces one way or the other, and are. But, human life being what it is, and with the traditions Wight are working toward on Spank the World, from the mid-’70s P-Funk of  Let’s Take it to the Stage to the work of groups like Afreaka!MandrillCymande and so on, those records never lacked for sex, whatever other issues they might’ve been tackling at the time, so one is inclined to roll with Wight as they accordingly play it loose on the narrative.

As they come out of the subtly jazzy “Interlude” with the spoken delivery of the album’s title line, and embark into “Island in the Sun,” with its laid-back nod tempo and waka-chawaka guitar, they even go so far as to acknowledge the departure they’re making. Again, the liner: ‘C’mon, Everybody Needs It.’ Aside from the statement of class equality inherent in that ‘everybody,’ the simple ‘c’mon’ acts not only as an invitation to the listener to join them on the trip they’re taking sound-wise, but seems to be looking to be cut some slack as well. And it’s slack well earned, because no matter where Wight venture in terms of mood or atmosphere on Spank the World, they do so with precisely as much of a sense of control as they want to convey. “Island in the Sun” shreds out a solo late. “Hot” departs into talkbox psychedelic quirk. “Motorgroove” dream-jams its way into the collection’s crunchiest riff. The minute-long “Outro” distorts electronic beats and bass to act as a bed for a quick description of the aftermath of the funky overlords’ wiping clean the slate of the earth.

But through all of this and everything else, Wight never seem to get lost, and each piece of Spank the World not only feels complete within itself — the instrumentals feel instrumental for a reason; the hooks are well placed — but feeds into the larger progression of the record as a whole. Spank the World is not at all a full-length that one might’ve guessed the band would eventually come up with nine years ago listening to Wight Weedy Wight, but finding out what they’re going to do next has always been part of what makes hearing a new Wight release such an exciting proposition, and as they take the forward steps they do with these tracks, working in and further toward continued mastery of their highly, highly individualized approach, they remain both exciting and unpredictable. This album? It’s a blast. Maybe you can get down and maybe you can’t, but if you find yourself thinking that an LP about giant alien robots coming not to make the Earth stand still, but to boogie into its oblivion is something that doesn’t appeal to you, I dare say it’s time to rethink that position. Today. Do it now.

I’m thrilled to host the premiere of the video for “Hot” below, and even more thrilled because it comes accompanied with such thorough background on the album from bassist Peter-Philipp Schierhorn. Thanks to the band for letting me host the clip, and to Schierhorn in particular for taking the time. Spank the World is out April 24 on Kozmik Artifactz and Fat and Holy Records.

Enjoy:

Wight, “Hot” official video premiere

Preorders here: https://lnk.to/Wight_SpanktheWorld

Peter-Philipp Schierhorn on Spank the World:

This is Peter, the bass player from Wight. Rene asked me to write a few words on our new album – right before the release, there are tonloads of stuff to do, and Rene is in charge of most of those. And maybe it’s also not the worst choice to hear the story from the personal perspective of a guy who was involved, but not from THE main guy who did almost everything the entire time.

As you may read in the “official” press text, Rene was definitely in charge of almost everything during the recording as well. At the first glance, that’s only a small change from previous releases, he was quite obviously credited as the producer or pre-producer on all our releases. Which makes sense, the guy went to college for sound engineering and has gathered quite a lot of experience as a live and studio engineer and producer over the years. “Spank the World” is however the first Wight release that didn’t involve at least some external sound engineer getting involved at some point (well, a friend mastered it in the end, but that was when everything was basically finished already).

There is of course a bit more to the story than we put in the official press text. Usually, people never read more than one page (if at all), but Rene told me you may be interested in some more background information. Lots of different things happened since we came back from the last tour in fall 2017. We haven’t been playing live all that much in the meanwhile, but as you can hear on the album we weren’t really lazy either. But we obviously didn’t spend two and a half years recording.

After “Love Is Not Only What You Know”, we were really figuring out how to work as a four piece band. Steffen wrote and recorded percussion for the album, but only got involved after the rest of the music had already been written. We then had to see how to perform live and quickly found out while percussion and synthesizers were a nice addition to our sound, they bounced us from being the easiest-to-mix rock trio in the world to being every FOH engineer’s nightmare. On top of that, we carried a full recording rig with us on one of the tour legs, which resulted in the “Fusion Rock Invasion – Live over Europe” live album. That one turned out nicely, but the tour was semi-hellish especially for our sound guy Josko (the guy who mastered our album) and Rene, who was of course supporting him besides being the front man of the band. Over time, we found a couple of solutions that made everyone’s life easier, such as having a sub-mixer on stage and only sending out a stereo signal of percussion and synths to the FOH. But that was only the beginning.

We also found out we could do a lot more musically with the additional member and a multitude of additional instruments, but that also meant that our usual approach of jamming in the rehearsal room, then playing the songs live until they were really tight, and then recording them in one go, no longer really worked. There are a few old-style jam tracks on the album, but at some point we decided to really focus on a studio recording. Finish and arrange stuff in the studio, use whatever means necessary to produce a great record, and then try and arrange those songs we wanted to play into proper live versions.

I don’t remember exactly when the decision was taken, but I remember that before the last “LINOWYK” tour in late 2017, Rene proposed a live hiatus afterwards, which we should use to help him build a studio so we could record our next album all by ourselves and take all the time we needed. He only had this tiny little studio, but the room next door in the building had just become available, he had rented it and wanted to make a proper recording room out of it.

That’s what we ended up doing, but it didn’t really go as planned. The more predictable bit was that Rene ended up doing most of the work himself, but as it was to be his workplace afterwards anyways, that wasn’t really that big of a problem (Rene may have a slightly different opinion here ;-)). Us other Wight members and many other friends helped and did some work, but of course the bulk got stuck with Rene himself, who basically spent every day in there for almost half a year.

But things didn’t end there – Thomas suddenly fucked off to the US, as he had taken a session job with an American band for four months, Rene’s wife became pregnant (ok, that one was planned I guess), my engineering job suddenly kicked into overdrive and had me flying all over the world, and on top of that, Rene and I got a bit sidetracked with Glanville, the heavy metal band we had founded as a fun little project a while earlier. The studio was usable by late 2018, but the band Wight hadn’t really played at all in the meanwhile. We had a few songs written before and started recording those right after Christmas 2018, but ended up spending most of 2019 rehearsing, writing and recording.

That actually kind of went in waves. The first couple of basic tracks went in pretty quickly, we went back to rehearsing, made a few more, back to the studio, same drill. At the same time, Rene kicked his brain into producer mode and kept layering stuff over the band tracks. There’s a new synth sitting in the studio? Let’s try that out. This sounds like we need horns – call up some friend that play sax and trombone here. Periklis Tsoukalas of Baba Zula is in town? Oh well, let’s see whether we can fit his electric oud in somewhere.

That entire process culminated somewhat in September of last year. We needed one more song for the album (as well as, of course, more overdubs), Rene had a basic structure and a few chords he had made up while lying on the beach in Thailand a few months earlier, and we took one week in the studio to make it into a song. I ended up playing the bassline one evening while high as fuck, with Rene telling me to change individual notes from time to time, but the rest of the week was basically Rene going crazy in there, calling up different guests for features, having Thomas and Steffen arrange some percussions and synths, and trying out every instrument that happened to be in the studio. Can you tell which song was the result of that?

Short story long, there were a few things more to be done, and I think Rene recorded the last bits and pieces only in December 2019 while already in the mixing process. Funnily enough, the cover artwork had been finished a long time before. Rene and our artwork guy, Ingo, hat met up God knows how long before and developed this piece with the huge intergalactic robot appearing over the Darmstadt skyline to destroy the world. That also ended up pushing the lyrical content of the album into a certain direction. Or did it? I’m still a bit surprised that basic love songs like Hot and Time’s Up actually ended up working very well in this entire apocalyptical context, but hey, sometimes things just work. And maybe Rene also knows what he’s doing a bit more than we sometimes give him credit for.

So the album was on its way, but we figured we needed a video. Not the usual live or live-ish video, but a proper music video like in the old days. We met in January 2020 to record the live scenes to the Hot music video, in one of our favorite pubs in town. The entire video was concepted by film students of Darmstadt’s University of Applied Science, with some input from Rene. One of the reasons why I’m writing this already overly long email is that Rene was just finishing the last shoots for the video this weekend… well, as you have the video or will get it very soon, I won’t lose any extra words on it, just see for yourself. And enjoy our new album – you now have the full background story, and I realize that I just made it sound like a mad journey full of “we don’t know what the hell we’re doing” and “oh shit, we didn’t see THAT coming”, but that is also kind of what happened. Does the album reflect that? I’ll let you be the judge. At least you know how it came to pass now, which may ease your confusion… or contribute to it.

Wight on Thee Facebooks

Wight on Instagram

Wight on Bandcamp

Kozmik Artifactz website

Kozmik Artifactz on Thee Facebooks

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