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The Bachelor sounds like another attempt by Wolf to perfect something that he got pretty much right on his first album.
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The Bachelor is the work of a hugely fertile imagination, skipping from the aforementioned Celtic folk to electro to glam, but one wonders how much more affecting Wolf might be if the grand passions were calmed down a little, the musical magpie impulses restrained a tad. For now, he's a little too much of a good thing.
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The Bachelor has more than a whiff of a histrionic West End musical confined to a primary school assembly hall which means it's 10 out of 10 for effort, but for execution...
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There’s talent here, but it seems Wolf’s spent so much time devising a plan to smuggle abstraction over the pop barricades that he neglected to pack the payload.
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His fourth album is a buzzing, overblown concept piece about psychic warfare, in which sheer force of will conquers icky stuff like depression and homophobia.
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Alternative PressThe London-based compulsive hair-dyer follows 2007's soulful breakout "The Magic Position" with the luxurious sounds of The Bachelor, the first half of a double album to mixed results. [Sep 2009, p.108]
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Patrick Wolf still engenders a puzzling and sometimes fascinating discussion about romanticism and pretension and authenticity and songwriter worship, but what’s disappointing is that he seems to no longer be a part of that discussion, simply the subject of it.
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Where his previous records felt vital and exciting, The Bachelor often sounds staid and predictable.
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MojoIf you open your album with a song, 'Hard Times,' which rails against the mediocrity of the modern world, it might be worth ensuring it isn't the only tune out of 14 that sticks in the memory. [Jul 2009, p.105]