One thing I never understood was the appeal of tribute acts. You could get the best Green Day cover band in the world and no matter how well they played together, how tight they were musically or how hard they tried to imitate Billie Joe et al, it just wouldn’t be the same as seeing the original. Whether it’s the fact that you’ll never be able to exactly match Mr. Armstrong’s vocal timbre, or the guitar tones will never sound just quite right, or even just the lack of celebrity appeal, it’s never going to be on a par with the band they’re trying to imitate.
If we’re being completely honest here, they only thing worse than cover bands, are those that refuse to admit they are one. They try their damndest to match the sound of their heroes, only they spend too much time doing this that they neglect to realise that they need to actually write some decent songs. Sadly, this is where Wolfgang Bang comes into the picture. At their best they sound like a rich man’s Sex Pistols, at their worst – a poor man’s Ramones. Because of this, ‘What are you going to do?’ simply just isn’t that great a record. Songs such as ‘Hey Hey Hey’ and ‘I just don’t wanna be alone’ don’t just pay homage to the aforementioned bands, they downright rip them off. The guitars are just too bloody bland to mention and vocalist Mikk has little to offer that hasn’t been done a hundred times before and a hundred times better. There are times when you get the impression that Wolfgang Bang have almost no talent at all, such as in the crapfest that is ‘Just tell that fool’.
It’s albums like ‘What are you gonna do?’ that really irritate me about the music industry. Here we have a band that has produced a CD of sub-par songs devoid of any real emotion, yet they have a record deal while hundreds of unsigned musical geniuses out there today that aren’t getting the recognition they deserve. Avoid this at all costs.
Andrew R