While musing on his influences, Dave Wyndorf speaks with contagious enthusiasm complete with expletives, jarring sound effects and plenty of gushing. The Monster Magnet frontman is a particularly big fan of a relatively short period of music, the time when rock was getting harder with bands like Led Zeppelin and Black Sabbath laying scenes to waste and with bands who were imitating them without having quite wrenched one foot out of the swirly psychedelia of the previous era. Stuff that crunches and soars and sounds fucking scary, but also carries a borderline ridiculous whimsy. Dragons and warlocks and ripping guitar solos – oh my!
He touches on music that bookends this overlooked time period, but mostly focuses on the early seventies. "I should definitely put a disclaimer on this," he explains. "I couldn’t do a list of my all-time favourite albums because it would be more like 130 albums. So, what I decided to do was take a list of records from my childhood that really kicked my ass. So let’s say that these are my favourite records as of 1974."
Monster Magnet have been championing Wyndorf’s chosen era in music since 1989, and have seen some hard rocking highs and some demoralising lows. During their growing success in the early 90s, the band became subjected to a media that didn’t quite know what to do with their brand of sci-fi-filtered 70s-style heavy metal. They were subsequently festooned with the ‘stoner rock’ banner alongside bands such as Josh Homme’s Kyuss and Goatsnake. But not to be pigeonholed, Monster Magnet would go on to tour with some of the biggest rock acts of the time, from Marilyn Manson to Aerosmith, and find their own individuality among them.
Through the ups and downs of the years, the band has rolled through quite a few different line-ups, leaving Wyndorf the sole original member still in the band. However, the material he has put out under the name has maintained an impressive integrity, showing just how Monster Magnet has always been predominantly a Wyndorf production.
Best known in his home country for the 1998 hit ‘Space Lord’ and its accompanying album Powertrip, Wyndorf and the band have been mostly touring Europe for the past decade or so, finding particularly fervent fans in Germany where they always tend to sell out. The most recent jaunt was in support of the band’s ninth studio effort Last Patrol, a great return to sixties psych garage-cum-heavy metal form that brought Wyndorf some of his best reviews in a decade.
Last Patrol is out now via Napalm Records. Click on his image below to begin scrolling through Dave’s choice
