Wounded Lion is a scrappy pop formation with more layers than one might think. The LA-based quintet artfully blends crunchy guitar chug and caveman thud with buoyant pop melody and deceptively simple lyrics, uncovering wonky pop gems along the way. The songs hint at melancholy but simultaneously offer infectious choruses and exuberant grooves. The resulting sound is fresh, despite celebrating everything from the Velvets to the Clean, with some CCR thrown in for good measure. Wounded Lion's live shows choogle and rock, backing confident showmanship with guileless grade-schooler dance moves.
The band pounds with authority, even while giving the sense that it's just barely keeping the rock together. In The Red Records is pleased to present Wounded Lion's debut album: twelve joyous, deadpan and sincere tracks. In them, guitars are allowed to be rhythm instruments, and simple words describe a not-so-simple world, but not in a bummer way. Instead, there's a pleasant confusion between animals, shapes, and people, all of whom can be found as friends, in outer space, underground, or in one's own unconscious. "Wounded Lion's brand of charmingly timeless pop rejects conventionally accepted aesthetics and approaches, to revel in an ecstatic indifference toward time, place, trend, and fashion [Their] formula is relatively simple.
The band writes shambling, alternately silly and poignant songs that bend and twist timeless pop hooks from the sixties onward." --Anomalous L.A. "The drum skins resonate with deep thudding as the bass and rhythm guitars belch out raw distortion, lending the band's music a primitive quality. But there is also a whimsical sensibility present that elevates its abrasiveness to a level of jubilance. Wounded Lion writes pop songs that celebrate the unrefined, dispensing with ego and tapping into the primal areas of the brain."