Hell, I’m only just back from holiday. My hamster wheel isn’t spinning back at it’s proper speed yet. So my decision making may be impaired. Look, for example at today’s new band, Wolfy and The Bat Cubs. They’ve only had a thousand views on Myspace. Their songs have all been played less than ten times. What kind of choice is that?

Wolfy and The Bat Cubs // Forgive Me Baby

You could say that this band have been done before, many, many times. You could say that their look is a throwback. You could say that their dense, lumbering songs are simply Neil Young rip-offs.

Maybe you’d be right. But you could also say that here is a band who’ve wholeheartedly embraced the past, for all its enticing beauty. Their hair is uniformly long; the guys look brusque and sport cigarettes; the girls are cute – ouch, how cute – and are choicely feisty. They all look about 18. Their guitar riffs and clobbering drums are similarly simple, but also thick, heavy and rich.

Forgive Me Baby scratched a part of my subconscious that I didn’t know needed tickling. Wolfy and The Bat Cubs are deeply likeable – loveable even – and yet it took me all of five listens to figure out why.

The answer was almost too simple: in Forgive Me Baby, WATBC have  written a great, lamenting, uplifting rock song with a hook that needles into a deep recess of your brain. That’s a really hard thing to do – ask Coldplay, who’ve been trying and failing for about a decade.

Occasionally there are bands that appear from nowhere, clutching a brilliant song that demands a much wider audience, simply because the song itself is bigger than them. Wolfy and The Bat Cubs are one of those bands. Excellent.

www.myspace.com/wolfyandthebatcubs