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'Lupercalia' was once an auspicious Roman fertility festival, a pagan rite which began on Wolf Mountain in Arcadia and was eventually brought into the heart of the city. It was a symbol of passion, tempered by domesticity rather than retrained by it, the way steel is tempered to form a blade.
It makes an incredibly fitting title for the fifth studio outing of the suitably lupine, Patrick Wolf. The album is itself, whilst being a celebration of love in all its disparate forms, is the most direct and gripping he has yet produced, as well as the most personal.
Patrick Wolf has always had an eye for the fantastical though, unlike other certain chart sensations, his yearning for fabulism has extended beyond his wardrobe and fed into his music. The Magic Position, the album that brought him to a wider audience back in 2006, featured songs haunted by the uncanny threat of fairytales, something wild whispering a promise to burst the even the brightest moments of bubblegum pop.
‘The Secret Gareden’, ‘Get Lost’, ‘Bluebells’ and ‘Stars’ all, in varying degrees, saw the song’s protagonist pondering his place in the world, overwrought by the unending, uncharitable volume of the outdoors in a crisis of identity and place. He tried solving this by becoming ‘The Bachelor’, but the mask just didn’t seem to fit.
On 'Lupercalia', Mr Wolf knows exactly where he is, who he is and what he is (and yes, presumably what time the time is…) Not only this, but he is ready to defend all those things. It makes for thrilling listening. Lead sing ‘The City’ comes out fighting, borrowing its stomping emphasis from a motown track you vaguely remember having heard from before it was written.
The key line here, “I won’t let no mystic snatch the roof from of our heads” establishes early the key theme in the album, namely a connection not only with the one you love, but the space you have to create to allow that love to occur.
The next song ‘House’ documents the process of a house becoming a home, riffing off of Thomas Hardy with the line “The native has returned”, an illusion to the fact that this new stage in Wolf’s writing has, in part, been informed by his recent relocation, nearer to the place of his birth.
Musically this album is less maudlin than his first brace of LPs and less experimental than this third and fourth. Though, there are interesting uses of a huge range of instruments, too numerous to list, and some trademark forays into electronica on the pleading ‘William’, this album is so accessible you feel a corner must have been cut somewhere.
This is not the case, these songs, despite their immediacy are also Wolf's most affecting yet, demonstrating that, however you find it, nothing lends credibility to music like a bit of sincerity.
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