Wesley Wolfe must get awful frustrated with his career. A masterful pop songwriter and crafty melodist on his fourth album, who is still waiting to reach some form of tipping point where he can give his life to his music and it is hard to really see why it hasn’t happened. But here is a clue: Wesley is too tricky, his arrangements are musical whirls of whiskey on an ice cream cone. It kicks too hard, it takes too long to sink in. And in his terrific new 30 minute ten song set, Numbskull, it is too depressive. Stuck waiting for a future that just won’t arrive, there is a morose undercurrent to these songs.
Nothing seems to be helping. The opening strum of the very first song “Lost In A Daydream” suggests the Everly Brothers, but the song soon sounds like a sinker “I’m an automatic mind, I get lost in my daydreams and I never come back to my senses” he sings and the song which has a lovely doctored throb to it, is just like that: it is dreamy but not content.
Maybe that is what Wolfe does, dreamy but not content. He writes a melody and then arranges it so thoroughly it takes too long to get you unless, like me, you are a huge fan any way.The North Carolina resident came to my attention back in 2009 with the terrific “Only Ray Of Sunshine”, the subsequent album Storage made a believer of me. I have followed him through two subsequent albums with nothing but pleasure, even as Wolfe has gotten more and more frustrated.
The frustration explodes on Numbskull, between aging, a fear of death, a sense of being stuck in a dream world and a short wait for infinity, Wolfe is stuck in a sort of loop, a feeling certainly exasperated by being on his fourth album with little traction. And it really isn’t fair at all, every one of these ten songs will make themselves felt given time and if his worldview is the definition of chilly, it amounts to a philosophy, unromantic, straightforward and important: “Fantasy keeps all us real people busy” he claims. “I dreamt of success but it only brings asshole. To be selfish and cutthroat wasn’t worth the hassle.” How sad, and not necessarily true, there are people who have a very serious love for Wesley’s music, me among them, he is a cult star who should be more.
Numbskull may be tired but it doesn’t sound tired, what ever might bother him doesn’t effect his music, or maybe it just make him use his arrangement gifts to change your ear levels, to make you hear what he wants you to hear. Wolfe won’t wrap it up in a pretty bow but he doesn’t have to. It stands as a rarity: ten perfectly crafted progressive pop songs.
Grade: A
