Scrambled Shell: Wolfmother, 'Cosmic Egg'

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WHEN AUSTRALIA'S WOLFMOTHER burst into the rock stratosphere with its self-titled debut in 2005, critics couldn't be happier with the band's hard-edged, '70s-steeped sound, the kid of grungy raw rock that fuses AC/DC with Led Zeppelin and never really looks toward the future.

On the band's sophomore album, "Cosmic Egg," Wolfmother basically pulls out all the same tricks — but with some Coheed and Cambria-like influences thrown in for good measure. The result is a similarly hard, slightly trippier sound that gets repetitive about halfway through the album and lacks most of the catchiness of previous singles "Woman" and "Joker & the Thief."

Maybe that stuck-in-a-rut-ness stems from the band's personnel problems. Bassist Chris Ross and drummer Myles Heskett, both co-founders of the group, departed last August. Singer and guitarist Andrew Stockdale pressed on, taking a few months to replace the other two spots in the trio. The band is now a four-piece with guitarist Aiden Nemeth, bassist and keyboardist Ian Peres and drummer Dave Atkins.

The churning guitar lines, driving drums and barely-there bass (this band really is one that's all about the guitar solos, after all) all sound exactly the same as before, and Stockdale's trademark whining wail helps create the illusion of sameness. The only noticeable change is the complete lack of it: There's no evolution here, and although Stockdale has added in a few more psychedelic touches — more layering and distortion, whacked-out synths and echo effects — they only truly work on a few songs from the 12-track album.

The album starts off with "California Queen," a misleadingly solid track that brings to mind "Woman," the frantically eccentric single that got the group the Grammy Award for Best Hard Rock Performance in 2007. "California Queen" is similarly hard-hitting, an onslaught of squealing guitars and thudding bass that stand up to Stewart's lyrics about a woman who has come "down from the mountain / To find another machine." He then asks, "Could you tell me where do all the people go? Rising from the mystic haze / Standing in front of all creation / With all their mystic ways / They seem to control the days." Musings about society's reliance on technology used as a random love letter to some detached omnipresent being? There's not a lot of lyrical depth there, but the sparseness works with the jam-happy instrumentation.

Almost immediately after that opener, though, the album takes a turn for the worse. For example, first single "New Moon Rising" has a more Southern stomp, with the instrumentation laying low for the most part and then punching in after every line of Stewart's verses, but the song lacks the kind of catchy flair of previous releases. And "White Feather" sounds almost like pop, with a lighter song structure (clue: your mom could probably nod her head along to it) and lyrics about the "dancing of feet." But the song's bouncing rhythm makes it sound almost too simplistic — we're guessing it will be on a future edition of "Guitar Hero" — and Stewart's recurrent rhyming of the word "now" with itself feels repetitive and frustrating.

And while the group switches it up with some ballads, "In the Morning" and "Far Away," the songs just steal from what other groups have already done. Stewart may have been listening to The Beatles' greatest, most drug-influenced hits when putting together the lyrics for "In the Morning," which touch on conversations between suns and mountains, looking "into the other side" and talking about thrown stones can help "the truth ... make itself known." And for "Far Away," Stewart adopts this faux-British accent that brings to mind the melancholy of Liam and Noel Gallagher, especially with lyrics about getting together when you're far away and how "love is gonna last forever." It's not exactly a cover of "Live Forever," but it's definitely too close for comfort.

The only songs that truly meld the band's raging instrumentation, brief experimentation and musing lyrics come toward the end of the album in "In the Castle" and "Violence of the Sun." The former starts with a forebodingly creepy synth section that spazzes out into nearly six minutes of hyper-eccentric psychedelics while Stewart shrieks about walking into the kingdom of the sun, and "Violence of the Sun" takes a slower pace to build into a sweeping epic of pianos, distortion and free-wheeling guitars, complete with lyrics about how we're all "little children / Playing the game of life." If so, Stewart and Co. need to grow up — "Cosmic Egg" is an underdeveloped record at best.

» 9:30 Club, 815 V St. NW; with TheNewNo2, Heartless Bastards, Wed., Nov. 4, 7 p.m., $30; 202-265-0930. (U St.-Cardozo)

Written by Express contributor Roxana Hadadi