The Wildhearts Albums (11)
'Stop Us If You've Heard This One Before, Vol. 1'
Release Date 7/2/2008
Tracks 15
Label 3d Japan
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What The Critics Say
What can one make of the Wildhearts? Their self-titled album's opening track, "Rooting for the Bad Guy," featured nearly nine minutes of thrash rock, as hard as anything Slipknot had ever done, but a melodic chorus and a guitar break in the middle were taken from the Slash book of how to play lead guitar. Ginger's throat surely must have been painful after screaming this set of songs, but that was his trademark: madness and mayhem. Every track sparkled with energy, "The Revolution Will Be Televised" sounding not unlike the Clash's "I Fought the Law," but a heavy guitar riff running through it marked this as a Wildhearts classic, and "Slaughtered Authors" was another eight-minute epic, giving the song time to build through several different themes, while the final track, "Destroy All Monsters," had a Metallica-style riff and three false endings before it finally came to a crashing halt. The Wildhearts marked the reunion of guitarist CJ (Chris Jaghdar) and drummer Ritch Battersby for the first time since the mid-'90s, and this was also the first album on which the band was joined by American bass player Scott Sorry, formerly of the U.S. punk band Amen and rockers Brides of Destruction. Not an album to appeal to the mainstream, but the fans who had stuck with the band since the early '90s would find plenty to excite them. ~ Sharon Mawer, All Music Guide
'Geordie in Wonderland'
Release Date 7/24/2006
Tracks 15
Label Secret
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What The Critics Say
For a brief spell during the early 21st century, the Darkness seemed to have single-handedly brought back the gloriously stupid, guilty pleasure of anthemic metal. But there had been other acts who modeled their sound after the same arena rock acts that Justin and Dan Hawkins brothers grew up on, namely fellow British rockers the Wildhearts. Although they never hit it big Stateside as they had in their homeland, the Wildhearts have toured and released albums consistently since the early '90s, and the group issued their fourth live album overall (if you count a Japanese import) in 2006, Geordie in Wonderland. The set does a fine job of capturing the group's powerful yet sleazy hard rock, as evidenced by the Metallica-meets-Guns N' Roses "Greeting from Shitsville" and the Motörhead-esque "Suckerpunch," while "Sick of Drugs" wouldn't sound out of place on a Darkness record. As longtime Wildhearts fans will attest, the group is best experienced on a concert stage, and Geordie in Wonderland doesn't disappoint. ~ Greg Prato, All Music Guide
What The Critics Say
Talk about a title that says it all -- despite a run of bad luck that rivals that of William H. Macy in The Cooler, the Wildhearts are a band that stubbornly refuses to be stopped, and Riff After Riff, the band's first American full-length since 1997, is one relentless powerhouse of hard rock groove, churning out massive guitar crunch, tough but buoyant melodies, thundering drums, and spot-on harmonies from the first stuttering chords of "Stormy in the North, Karma in the South" to the final feedback swells and party fracas of "Let's Go." Recycling six cuts from the Japanese Riff After Riff After Motherfucking Riff EP, this album has the benefit of a name you can say in front of your mom, but the good news is that the Wildhearts' patented blend of hard rock punch, glam-inspired melodic texture, and punk rock energy and abandon sounds as powerful as ever. What's more, frontal lobe Ginger is one of those rare guys who knows there's something just a bit goofy about the muscle and pomp of Big Loud Rock, and that this is not to be ignored or considered a badge of shame, but part of what makes this stuff great. Which is to say Riff After Riff is hard rock that's actually fun, and the purposeful laughs in "Better Than Cable," "Putting It On," and "Action Panzer" just add value to the package. If there's still room in your musical heart for sweaty English guys with loud guitars, big amps, and a notion to have some non-wholesome good times, then Riff After Riff deserves a place on your stereo, and it's nice to have the Wildhearts back on domestic plastic after all these years. ~ Mark Deming, All Music Guide
'The Wildhearts Must Be Destroyed'
Release Date 9/23/2003
Tracks 11
Label Import
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What The Critics Say
After unleashing the cleverly titled Riff After Riff After Motherfucking Riff EP in 2002, English hard rockers the Wildhearts took their long overdue comeback trail into full-length album territory with 2003's The Wildhearts Must Be Destroyed. Problem is, it may not be the sort of comeback the band's few but fanatic fans were expecting. Sure, most of the old songwriting tricks (heavy guitar bombast, big pop hooks, cleverly snide lyrics) normally employed by prolific singer/guitarist Ginger remain unchanged -- check! The band's inimitable ability to mix Cheap Trick bubblegum with Metallica heavyness is well intact -- check! And the official return of much-loved second guitarist C.J. Jagdhar in itself pretty much validates the reunion exercise as a whole -- check! But for all these validations, ...Must Be Destroyed is still missing a certain, crucial X-factor to help it attain the volatile, unpredictable spark that made the Wildhearts the most dangerous band of the mid-'90s. Opening number "Nexus Icon" is forceful enough, but, like subsequent, chart-minded numbers such as the "Only Love" (featuring Motown-like female backup vocals), "Someone That Won't Let Me Go," and even the not-so "vanilla" "Vanilla Radio," it feels rather predictable and one-dimensional. The abnormally pop-tastic (even by Ginger's standards) "One Love, One Life, One Girl" follows, and actually sounds like it may possess the legs to become a lasting classic in the end. But after screaming their way through the utterly forgettable sub-two-minute thrash-out "Get Your Groove On," the band settles into a long string of commercial rockers ("So Into You," "It's All up to Me," "Top of the World," etc.) that are virtually indistinguishable from one another and leave little to no sensory residue. Jumping to conclusions (and why not?), one might assume that pressure to score a hit finally rendered the Wildhearts safe as milk. But given the band's lengthy hiatus prior to this rebirth, it's more realistic to realize that ...Must be Destroyed finds the Wildhearts far too aware of themselves -- probably because they were still just getting reacquainted with their old roles, and what it felt like being the Wildhearts. ~ Eduardo Rivadavia, All Music Guide
'Riff After Riff After Motherfucking Riff'
Release Date 12/24/2002
Tracks 7
Label Japanese Import
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'Landmines & Pantomimes'
Release Date 8/25/1998
Tracks 12
Label Import
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What The Critics Say
Endless, Nameless finds the Wildhearts opting for an indie label after their time with Warner failed to yield any hits. Stylstically, the album doesn't sound that different from their earlier releases, but it is a surprsingly consistent and appealing set of thunderous hard-rock. The album may take its name from Nirvana's unlisted noise symphony at the end of Nevermind, but the record owes more to straight-ahead glam-rock and metal and its the better for it. ~ Stephen Thomas Erlewine, All Music Guide
What The Critics Say
Though it had featured a stunning collection of would-be hits and almost-classic hard rock anthems, the Wildhearts' first full-length album Earth vs. the Wildhearts had suffered from a terribly lifeless production job which somehow managed to douse most of the band's volatile spark. So it was with great relief that listeners finally got to enjoy all the creative, daring, explosive power and barely reigned-in lunacy of the band's incredible live performances with the release of their excellent 1995 sophomore effort P.H.U.Q. Strangely, however, the Wildhearts employed no less than two competent producers in the making of the album. With Mark Dodson (Anthrax, Ugly Kid Joe) overseeing seven tracks and Simon Efemey (Paradise Lost) working on the remaining five, the fact that the band somehow managed to construct such a seamless and satisfying whole from such a disjointed process is nothing short of a miracle. Even by main man Ginger's production line standards, tracks like "Just in Lust," "Nita Nitro," and "Jonesing for Jones" rank among the Wildhearts' best material, and opener "I Wanna Go Where the People Go" is quite possibly their best single ever -- no mean feat. By contrast, the album's climax arrives with an extended suite which begins with the cleverly titled instrumental "Cold Patootie Tango" careens through the stop-start dynamics of "Caprice" and concludes with the cathartic anthem of disenfranchisement which is "Be My Drug." With so much inspiration flying around, Ginger's sardonic, profanity-laced lyrics are often the only thing limiting the hit potential. P.H.U.Q. officially concludes with the frenetically repetitive "Getting It," but some CD versions also feature two bonus tracks ("Inglorious" and "Schizophonic") culled from the previously fan club-only release Fishing for Luckies. Despite being embraced by critics and fans in Britain and across Europe, P.H.U.Q. was to be the Wildhearts' most overlooked masterpiece in America, and it is little wonder that the band never fully recovered from their disappointment. ~ Eduardo Rivadavia, All Music Guide
'Fishing for Luckies'
Release Date 1/1/1995
Tracks 10
Label East West
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What The Critics Say
Collecting numerous studio outtakes from the amazingly prolific Wildhearts, Fishing for Luckies was originally made available only to the band's fan club. Later repackaged and resequenced for commercial release, the album contains so much topnotch material that it almost qualifies as a full-fledged successor to 1995's excellent P.H.U.Q. record. In fact, the only clear signs betraying this as anything but a legitimate album are many of the song's lengths. Short bursts of madness like the cartoonish "Mood Swings & Roundabouts" and "In Like Flynn" are countered with some of singer/guitarist Ginger's most ambitious mad epics. Among these, "Inglorious" and "Schitzophonic" had already made appearances as bonus tracks on the CD version of P.H.U.Q., but outrageous, never-before-heard musical voyages like "Sky Babies" and the awesome children-led choruses of "Do the Channel Bop" push the boundaries of normality like only the Wildhearts seemed capable of. Considering the group's eventual collapse amidst record company ineptitude, intra-band strife, and Ginger simply being a complete nutter, Fishing for Luckies deserves even more recognition as a worthy part of this band's already impressive discography. ~ Eduardo Rivadavia, All Music Guide
