DREAM WULF
Sallow harvest moons hang heavy in orbit, tangling their ultraviolet rainbows amongst saguaro cacti and languishing sand dunes. Smoke and ceremony cling thickly to air thrumming with a rhythm and its echo, always wandering but never straying.
Prints in the sand lead you coyly forward - ever forward - to the den of the Dream Wulf.
Dante’s Inferno is the busiest bar I’ve seen in months, the unusually humid summer air beating gently at the back of a swaying crowd, bobbing heads and stomping boots. The front door swings open to admit another masked pilgrim, returning at long last to the temple of live music, the altar of rhythm and melody.
Four figures adorn the stage, blasted and glimmering under iridescent spotlights - John Villedelgado and Jessica Bahl are familiar faces from another lifetime, eyes locked as their guitars rock out the melody to Apex in complex unison. I’ve yet to meet the newest additions to the Wulfpack, but I know the man testing his drum kit to the limits is David Powel and his rhythm-section compatriot, hacking off massive grooves with the dexterity of a master swordsman is Charlie Chimchar. It’s immediately apparent that these recent additions to the lineup display the same fluid intensity and chaotic precision I’ve come to expect from my favorite psychedelic grunge outfit.
Grinning, I rest my camera for a minute and lose myself in the fray to an immaculate cover of Jefferson Airplane’s White Rabbit that snarls at all the right times and sets hairs on necks to standing. Jessica channels Grace Slick’s haunting, enticing vocal delivery so completely that the room is shifted and overlaid briefly in a different time.
One of the things I missed most about concerts is the tension and release - the palpable, urgent sway that ebbs and flows as a dynamic piece of music slinks and flies and crashes to Earth. Dream Wulf are architects of sonic space, teasing forth atmospheres dense with pattern and feeling and nurturing simple riffs into giant-striding crescendos on Darkness.
The simmering intensity of Chimchar’s basslines and Villedelgado’s virtuosic soloing stand in stark contrast to the high, pure moonlight of Bahl’s voice on Last Known Purple. Powel is a metronomic chameleon, contracting and expanding rhythms to suck the air from the room and spread a vast horizon in every direction at the climax of Rose Painted Dying. Every story the band tells wanders through solitary valleys and summits high peaks laced with wild lightning, unafraid to indulge extremes of movement and stillness, melancholy and ecstasy.
I won’t spoil any details of Wisemind, the brand new track Dream Wulf played at Dante’s on that humid summer night. You’ll have to barter, beg, seek and source it for yourself.
I will say that it filled me with wonder and terrifying desire, and mostly with hope for the return of live music and the continued growth of incredible local talent like Dream Wulf. Ears ringing, sweat trickling, I emerged into that hot summer air feeling my tired soul was healing, beginning to grin again as my unnoticed fingers retraced guitar riffs the whole way back to the car.
