In the supporting material that came with this, CJ Wildheart admits: “I’ll be honest, I really struggled with this one, not so much writing it, but trying to find the drive.”
Which is odd, really, considering how urgent Devil sounds.
Playing most of it himself, with Bullet For My Valentine man Jason Bowld on drums, CJ channels every bit of that frustration into something that feels wired, wound-up and ready to explode. There is nothing hesitant here. No sense of a man searching for purpose. Instead, Devil sounds like someone who found the spark again and decided to turn it all the way up.
“Nein Nein Nein” makes that plain. “Listen to me, it’s a bloody emergency,” he sings, and the lyrics are shot through with worry. The music, though, is pure CJ: fast, tuneful, snarling in all the right places. That has always been a given, but on his more recent solo work there has been something else too. He has sounded royally pissed off, and that edge suits him.
“The Art Of Being Free” starts with a child speaking about freedom, and from there CJ seems to be looking for a way out. Escape. Release. Something beyond the noise. You wonder, for a moment, whether this is some kind of swansong. Is he going to leave all this behind and devote himself to hot sauce and animals? Surely not. He’s a lifer. Like all the times I said I wasn’t going to watch Stoke anymore and still went the following Saturday.
And then comes “Diva”, which gives the game away. “I don’t know what I’m going to do… fuck it,” he says, and suddenly the answer is obvious. He’s going nowhere. The song is a proper punk rock rager, and even the harmonies, aping the Beach Boys, are better than the real thing has any right to be these days – and were the other week.
That is the thing with CJ. He has always had the gift that seems to come with that surname: making catchy sound effortless. “SOB” is punk rock done perfectly, but with that guitar sound that nobody else quite gets. There is crunch, melody, spite, heart, and just enough suspicion that some of these lyrics might be more autobiographical than he is letting on.
“Doing the best I can,” he sings on “Sometime To Return”, and that one is a real highlight. An absolute beauty, it simply sweeps you along. There is no overthinking it, no clever trickery, just the sound of someone who understands instinctively how to write a song that lodges itself in your head and refuses to leave.
Elsewhere, “One Of The Boys” has more than a touch of Dropkick Murphys in the stomp and spirit. “The road I walk is where I have to be,” he offers, before adding, “When the curtain falls I’m just one of the boys.” Two key lines, really. For all the frustration, all the doubt, all the moments where this seems to be wrestling with whether it still matters, Devil keeps coming back to the same conclusion: this is who he is.
“Rotten” is another that sweeps you along, its manifesto according to Chris Jagdhar gloriously simple: “All or nothing, not in moderation.” And why not? The guitar sound is so early Wildhearts that you half expect someone to say “thanks, Mick” when the solo finishes.
“No More” whips itself into a frenzy and borrows from Edwin Starr while finding hope for the young. That balance is all over the record, actually. Anger and optimism. Worry and defiance. The sense that everything might be falling apart, but there’s still a chorus to be sung while it does.
And surely, beneath everything else, Devil is about the joy of rock n roll. “Twenty Two” proves it beyond doubt, as joyous as Hanoi Rocks, but with the line “there were days when I thought it was all over” giving it a little extra weight. That is where this album works best: when it sounds like a celebration made by someone who has had to fight his way back to the party.
By the end, “Fade” is awash with melody and harmony, but still with a score to settle. Perhaps it is fitting that it ends in reflection, the last line on the album being: “Remember I love you.” After all the noise, all the frustration, all the punk rock fury, that is what remains.
Devil is a quite wonderful thing. Arguably the best of CJ Wildheart’s recent solo outings, and when you bear in mind how good the others were, that is saying something.
Maybe the devil always did have the best tunes.
Rating: No one with the name Wildheart is ranked out of 10 on this site.
