Americana UK Review | The Real Tuesday Weld | Songs for The Last Werewolf – 7/10

Americana UK
The Real Tuesday Weld: “Songs for The Last Werewolf”
Crammed discs, 2011
by Jonathan Aird
October, 2011
Bad Moon Rising : Is this the way of the future, a multi-media listening and reading experience?

“Songs for The Last Werewolf” is an album of music inspired by Glen Duncan’s book of the same title. It sits somewhere between the soundtrack of a non-existent movie, adding atmosphere to the unfilmed scenes, and with the mixture of music and snatches of spoken word – presumably dialogue from the novel – a musical interpretation of the novel. Here though the music tells the story arc by itself that it could stand alone well enough without these additional narrative hints.
It’s an intoxicating blend of Bohemian jazz, twenties crooning, electronica and more, which creates a fantastic realm of mist filled streets haunted by the full moon.

The world it creates for the narrative is part burlesque club and part Bladerunner; there’s a dash of Beefheartian blues thrown in on the howling “Wolfman” and the gorgeous nocturne of “The Lupine Waltz” conjuring up a turn of the nineteenth century decadence.