Come sea about me: Sea Wolf in performance elsewhere. Photo by Alex Brown Church
By Chris Lotto
Sea Wolf is Alex Brown Church, the band’s frontperson and only standing member. The rest of his pack are drawn on a rotating basis from a conglomerate of LA musicians known as the Ship Collective. It’s unclear whether this tour will produce a more permanent membership. On Wednesday, Oct. 3, at the Independent, he was backed by drums, bass, cello, a drowned-out lead guitar, and an extremely sexy keyboardist doing this lazybop back-and-forth shoulder maneuver the whole night. I think I may have seen a ring on her finger. No matter. That’s not the sort of band review we’re after here.
Invoking the spirit of Jack London’s 1904 work, Sea Wolf plays to life’s awareness of death. The songs intimate a fondness for bluegrass, moving in time with Church’s favorite apprehension: the decay of the natural world. The first five numbers could have easily featured Church alone with zero accompaniment. Like I said, Sea Wolf is Alex Brown Church. It’s not that the show was any less enjoyable because of all the other noise – only that a brooding cello line layered over a skip-slowly backbeat didn’t add much in the way of color, depth, or interest to Church’s own brooding melodies and skip-slowly acoustic.
Nor is this meant to discount Church’s – and the band’s – effectiveness in conveying a sense of well-traveled melancholia. He’s got a storyteller’s voice that leaves a near sad impression, yet it remains a voice that aims to please – Church has a gift for creating contented hymns of worry. Plenty of heads were bobbing inside the Independent, and Church’s reminiscences definitely had a couple thirtysomething couples giving each other the old “yeah, he’s got it” nod of approval. The lyrics are plenty evocative, happy to be doing a eulogist’s work, but much of the instrumentation is redundant, wasted on Church’s singer-songwriting.
Sea Wolf did get the place going with one you may have heard on the radio, “You’re a Wolf,” a tame little rock-out that, along with a second one just like it – punchy, highly civilized – made a little room for meaningful collaboration. And though it was a short set composed of short songs that all ended abruptly, it seemed that everybody in attendance, myself included, appreciated Church’s thoughtfulness, even more his easy, plangent grace.