Natural History Magazine - The language and music of the Wolves (Tonsil)

This record is a hipster favorite, for obvious reasons.

And it's pretty much what you'd expect. One side consists of Redford, "actor and nature lover", offering his sage thoughts on the plight of wolves in the domesticated United States, punctuated by wolf howls. The other side is the exact same wolf howls, repeated, layered, re-ordered.

The key here is that they actually replay the same samples over and over again. One band is actually called "Single Howls Joined to Give Illusion of Pack Howl". Why they felt the need to assemble that track even though they finish off the record with a number of legit group howls, nobody knows.

Redford spins a true and important tale of the misunderstood wild wolf, losing its traditional predatory hunting grounds to agriculture and then having its food source cut off by possessive humans. I have a tough time believing him as passionate wolf-lover with his deadpan delivery and stock photo gaze on the back cover. From beginning to end of this record, Redford's droll musings fail to present the copied and spliced wolf calls that are expected to carry the weight of this record and the whole effort falls flat.

I can imagine the conversation with his agent now. "I've got this great gig for you, Robbie," (I imagine his agent wearing a tweed suit and chewing on a cigar) "It doesn't pay much... okay it doesn't pay at all. But this environmentalist thing is big, big I tell you, big!" I also see this as a pretty one-sided conversation.

Oh, also; Art Director George Lois, you're friggin' fired. I mean, I know it was 1971 and you only had so much to work with, and I realize this is only an "American Museum of Natural History Special Member's Bonus", but I just feel like you could have gone a little farther here.