Music Arcades: Wolf People: Steeple

I wandered into one of the tents at last year's End of the Road festival and came across these boys. Despite their early-twenties faces, they looked and sounded like they'd just parachuted in from 1973. Somehow comparisons with the Edgar Broughton Band came into my head, even though I'd never knowingly heard anything by the EBB. They were clearly having fun — grins on their faces and guitar jams that could only be described as "rollicking".

"Great band to see at a festival," I thought, "but not the kind of thing you'd want to sit down and listen to." I went off to see what was happening elsewhere on the festival site. Not much, and I found myself drawn back to the tent until the end of Wolf People's set. When I left the festival nearly 48 hours later, it was still their performance that lingered in my ear.

On returning home, only their Tidings album was available on Spotify, and that didn't make much of an impression. But Steeple came out a month later, and downloaded the first four tracks from eMusic "just to check" that my hunch about not wanting to sit down and listen to them was correct.

Very quickly I found myself replaying those four songs as soon as they'd finished. It's the fourth track Morning Born that was, and remains, my favourite. I'm no expert in guitar rigs, but there's something about the perfect mix of distortion and feedback they get that pins my ears back. Overall, the sound brings to mind something like Mountain's Nantucket Sleighride with a touch of Jethro Tull (though I've never liked them) — but that guitar has more than a dash of Ragged Glory about it.

Before long I had the whole album downloaded, but even that wasn't enough. I wanted to hear that noise coming out of my big speakers. And I thought the album art might look good when blown up beyond a postage stamp. I hoped it might be a good old gatefold sleeve, to be honest. That turned out not to be the case when I treated myself to this record in February, but, that aside, it's a vinyl release done properly — unlike one other recent release that I'll mention in a bit. The only slight disappointment is that, surprisingly, the guitar sound doesn't have quite the same impact coming out of the speakers as it does on headphones.