Pop and Jazz Reviews : Wolfgang Press Difficult to Classify

The Wolfgang Press is famously hard to classify, a London-based band on the dream-pop 4AD label that has seemed alternately punk, arty and gloom-stricken in the course of a decade-long career, equally grounded in the Bauhaus thing and in sweet ‘70s soul. To give you some idea, the band is possibly better known in record-collector circles for its moodily gorgeous album jackets than for any songs that might be contained within.

At the Whisky on Tuesday, augmented from a trio to a sextet for the occasion, the band threw down hazy, repetitive loops that sounded like sleepytime Public Enemy--call them Public Ennui. It performed a power-funk version of a Randy Newman song. It sounded just like its album. It roused the sweaty crowd with both Janet Jackson beats and grooves that sounded like the most banal of bouncy British house music. Wolfgang Press didn’t make itself any easier to classify at all.

Singer Mick Allen--deep-voiced, a little hammy--is something of a master of the post-Bowie histrionic spoken lyric. But there is a certain beauty in what Wolfgang Press does, chiefly within the effect of raging drums mated with guitarist Andrew Gray’s delicately dissonant counterpoint.