The Wonder Stuff
Album: On No It's...The Wonder Stuff
Label: IRL
Tracks: 11/10
Website: http://www.thewonderstuff.com

Recent years have seen the Wonder Stuff experimenting with more of a folk idiom, they've even played the hallowed turf of Cambridge Folk Festival. Band founder and leader Miles Hunt, together with fiddle player Erica Nockalls have frequently been out touring as a well respected duo in addition to doing the band stuff.

"On No It's…The Wonder Stuff" sees the band straddling three camps, not bad for a 2cd package. As well as confirming their indie darlings status and new folk influence, this release sees the band becoming a premier league tribute band and it's the second CD that really gives this package a real sense of sparkle and ensures that there is something here for not only fans old and new, but also for the idly curious.

Not that that should detract from CD one. It shows that the band have lost none of their songwriting prowess. These are songs that prove that the Wonder Stuff are still a band that's got a lot to say and knows how to say it.

CD2 pays tribute to fellow acts from the West Midlands and applies a Wonder Stuff stamp to them and it's that latter bit that takes this beyond most tribute bands, however classy, plying their trade in Blackcountry Working Men's Clubs. This is about taking the songs that the band have grown up and been inspired by and putting their own band in the middle of the mix.

It's a formula that the band carry off well, avoiding the kitsch that this could so easily have become. Listening, for example, to "Goodbye Blackberry Way", you can feel the band channelling Roy Wood, but they are definitely not trying to be the Move. Sure they may not have made as many changes to the presentation of the song as Red Shoes did recently, but they are very different bands, just as the Wonder Stuff are different to the Move.

Across the songs you can hear many of the different incarnations of the sound of the Wonder Stuff. This is particularly brought home on their folkish, stripped back interpretation of The Primitives classic "Crash", making it a very different song from the originals, even giving it some surf rock harmonies.

"Oh No It's…The Wonder Stuff" has that wonderful juxtaposition of the relationship between the companion cds, with the track "From The Midlands With Love" on one proving to be the inytroduction to the other. Either way you slice and dice the package, the key factor is that this is great value for both enjoyment and money, nuff said, job done.

Neil King