Humble Wolf grows harder together

Jayson Angove isn’t very good at sitting still. Aside from playing in his band Humble Wolf, he also performs as a solo artist and drums for Thunder Cover. Not that long ago, he was in five bands.

He insists that he saves his best material for Humble Wolf, though. The driving force behind his debut solo record, 2015’s King of Vacant Spaces, was to record the music that wasn’t quite good enough—or rocking enough—for Humble Wolf.

And certainly, Humble Wolf has made a noticeable splash in the local scene in the past few years. The Roseville band played to 5,500 people at Concerts in the Park in May, and to twice that number while headlining Deschutes Brewery’s Street Pub in Midtown last November.

Angove attributes some of the enthusiasm to the band’s hard sound: moody, riff-heavy and guitar-driven, similar to Foo Fighters, Led Zeppelin or Tool. This is a big change from Humble Wolf’s more indie debut, Paper Thin, from 2012, which Angove recorded by himself with friend Paul Bates on drums. Now, on the cusp of putting out its third release, Fiction For Liars, Humble Wolf has solidified the thickly distorted powerhouse energy that now drives the band’s music.

“The first Humble Wolf record has some pretty mellow stuff—we’ve never played those songs,” Angove says.

The group beefed up its sound with its sophomore album, Black And White. Fiction For Liars, which should be released by the end of the year, is similarly driven by brutal guitars and big-sounding drums. The biggest difference? While Angove wrote Black And White, the members of Humble Wolf—Angove (vocals, guitar), Chris Winger (guitar), David Albertson (Bass) and Jesse Sherwood (drums)—worked together on Fiction For Liars. The result is a more concise, dynamic album with stronger chemistry.

“When I write a song, I know what I would do on drums, bass, keyboards, guitar and vocals,” Angove says. “When you have multiple people working on a project, fun surprises you may not have thought of can appear, and most of the time they do. It is becoming more of a multidimensional project.”

On Friday, July 29, at the Opera House Saloon in Roseville, Humble Wolf will release its first single off Fiction for Liars, “Number.” While the rest of the album is packed with hard rockers, “Number” shows the group’s range, particularly for folks unfamiliar with the more scatterbrained Paper Thin.

Of course, the circumstances for that record were much different. Angove got a surprise call from Bates in 2011, who showed a friend some of Angove’s earlier recordings, which impressed him so much that he flew Angove to Indiana to record an album for his label, Unboxed Records. This became Paper Thin.

“I had just lost my job so anything sounded good at the time,” Angove says. “I got flown out to Indiana to record in a huge studio. I felt like a rock star for two to three weeks.”

Almost immediately upon returning to Roseville, Angove called up some friends to make Humble Wolf a live, working project.

It’s all about timing, and so far Humble Wolf has had its share of good luck in that respect. When Angove got the call to go to Indiana, he was considering quitting music altogether.

“I felt like I didn’t know if I can do this anymore,” Angove says. “Maybe I’ll just do this for fun. … It’s funny how the human mind works because that’s not where I’m at anymore.”