Review: Wo Fat – The Conjuring

Wo Fat

The Conjuring

Small Stone

Street: 6.17

Wo Fat = Orange Goblin + Kung Pao

What’s in a name? Maybe too little or too much, or both at once. Especially if the name is inked onto your chest in a script–Chinese, Latin, Hittite—you can’t read. We’ve all seen it. When you have exhausted your own funds, grab the assets of others. Because theft (still) is (maybe) rock n’ roll.

Such seems to be the informal logic guiding Wo Fat’s The Conjuring. Here is yet another down-tuned trio named after some low-brow exotic stereotype, in this case a network-television criminal mastermind. By now how many bands have tried—ironically or otherwise—to build a reputation on borrowed badass? Politics aside, Wo Fat brings to the counter a deep-fried slab containing nothing not falling within one industry’s limits of standard deviation.

Sampled B-movie dialogue and tips of the brim to ZZ Top only add an extra onion ring to this musical Quarter Pounder with Cheese. Perhaps it’s for the best that I detect nothing genuinely plummy in the burger mix. No doubt, an established demographic will eagerly consume The Conjuring. –Brian Kubarycz