These Are Dangerous Times: A Quick Review Of The Debut Album From Dragon Welding (Andrew Golding From The Wolfhounds)

The debut self-titled album from Dragon Welding is an impressive set of post-punk songs. The band's name is an anagram of Andrew Golding, one of the founding members of the esteemed British band, The Wolfhounds. And, like those legends from the C86 era, the music here is bracing, angular, catchy, and smart all at once.

Dragon Welding, out tomorrow on A Turntable Friend Records, opens with the determined chug of "The Builders", before the drone-y "One Miserable Summer" unfurls like one of the slower numbers on The Holy Bible. If Andrew Golding is not as obsessed with metal-ish guitar pyrotechnics as was the young James Dean Bradfield, he is, like his mates in The Wolfhounds, addressing, however obliquely, the state of a U.K. wrapped in the throes of Brexit. Elsewhere, "These Are Dangerous Times" marries a faint folk-y strum with a real purposeful, striding hook, even as the rougher "Join the Dots" edges a bit closer to classic Wolfhounds material. Dragon Welding gets more abstract as it goes along, with the closer "Lament for Common Sense" revealing itself as an epic Fripp-inspired drone that stretches into the void for nearly 7 minutes.

There's a seriousness here that befits this sort of project, and, like The Wolfhounds, Andrew Golding understands how to make indie-pop. For any serious theme, or near-avant-garde musical idea that he puts forward, he makes sure that Dragon Welding is, on the whole, a listenable record. It's that, and an really fantastic piece of work. I would love to hear more from this Wolfhounds spin-off.

Dragon Welding is out tomorrow via A Turntable Friend Records.

More details on Dragon Welding via the band's official Facebook page.

[Photo: Courtesy Dragon Welding / Shameless PR]