Music

Wolf is one of pop’s oddballs. Not in the self-consciously wacky sense, like that knob from Maximo Park, but in the drily dissociative way of a Syd Barrett or Kate Bush. Wolf’s 2003 debut, ‘Lycanthropy’, was greeted like Klaatu from ‘The Day The Earth Stood Still’. In those dark, pre-Joanna Newsom days, people knew his arrival was an event, but couldn’t work out quite what to think of it. The title referred to werewolves, but the album sounded more like something Renfield’s febrile mind would have imagined while he waited for Dracula.

Maybe it’s because we’ve got used to this outsiderism, or maybe it’s because Wolf is mellowing in his still-irritatingly-young age, but his excellent album, ‘The Magic Position’ is seen, controversially in some quarters, as Wolf’s shot at the mainstream. It’s still as literate and, in places at least, complex as his earlier work, but there is a pronounced electro-pop influence on his usual violin-dub thing. Mind you, this is only a bad thing if you’re even more wilfully arcane than Patrick Wolf is.