The Wildhearts – Satanic Rites Of The Wildhearts

Mention The Wildhearts to the man on the Clapham omnibus and you’ll most likely get a blank stare. This is despite them achieving Top 20 singles and two Top 10 albums in a disjointed and idiosyncratic career spanning (thus far) 35-years plus. This puts them firmly in a kind of Championship league of British bands that would include Therapy?, most of the iterations of the punk OGs and so on and so forth. The Leeds United of bands, if you will – fanatically beloved and always on the brink of greater things they never quite manage. 

The Satanic Rites of The Wildhearts – the band’s 11th studio album – mines rich new veins of the melodic hardcore glam metal punk they have made their own. The album opens with ‘Eventually’ which is six sublime minutes of heavy riffing bolted on to the sweetest of singalong choruses. ‘Scared of Glass’ sounds like The Sweet doing 10cc, complete with ‘whoa-whoa’ chorus, giving the song a footie terrace feelgood vibe. Ginger Wildheart‘s lyrical acuity and storytelling acumen come to the fore in this reviewer’s favourite track from the album. ‘Troubadour Moon’, which is massively catchy with its Thin Lizzy-esque twin lead guitar attack. ‘Fire In The Cheap Seats’  delivers brutal  atonal metal riffing with gorgeous melody, a kind of in-song bipolarity The Wildhearts do like no other. Like a kind of demented punk karaoke, ‘Kunce’ offers a catalogue of disreputable types (“Superior cyclists/Gammon apologists”) underscored by what can only be described as The Clash at their fiery best. 

‘Maintain Radio Silence’ does quite the opposite, battering your ears and showcasing the band’s raw power. This is The Wildhearts at their brutal best, but the melody is still there fighting to come out. ‘Blue Moon Over Brinkburn’ is Ginger at his angry, confessional best: “The teacher said that I’d never be anything/I said I’d be back with a record to prove that he was wrong”. And he was. 

While listening to ‘Hurt People Hurt People’, something odd happened to my eyes. It’s a truly magnificent song at odds with the rest of the album. Bruised, magnificent and uplifting. Where the fuck is this man’s Novello Award? If Coldplay recorded a version of this song, it would be top of the charts, if that is still a thing, for six fucking years. Normal service is resumed with ‘I’ll Be Your Monster’ with its swaggering glam rock stomp and space age synths and unsettling Breaking Glass sax solo. ‘Failure Is The Mother Of Success’ channels a Therapy?-like guitar assault over a savage eight-minutes interspersed with some what can only be described as interruptions of pop music in various styles. The Wildhearts paradox in one mighty piece. ‘You took a lot of knocks to get where you are today‘ is a fine coda to this inspirational mini opera. The album closes with ‘Loyola’, which is a heavy exclamation mark at the end of what can only be described as an astonishing album.

The Wildhearts pull off the brilliant and quite mesmerising trick of being the musical chameleons of our age while remaining utterly original and unique. This album is not entertainment. It’s not willowy young women with an acoustic guitar. It’s Ginger Wildheart and his viking horde, pillaging the hearts and minds of the music-loving world. Do not resist.

Satanic Rites Of The Wildhearts is out now on Snakefarm Records.