Vulfpeck: Clarity of Cal review – at long last, a hit

After a string of increasingly unfunny joke albums, Jack Stratton and co get (a little) more serious on this latest collection of joyful funk-pop tunes. It ranks as one of Vulfpeck’s finest outings to date, even if they let it slip in the closing stages.

Up until very recently, beloved Michigan funk collective Vulfpeck had arguably never released a good album. Fans will point to 2016’s The Beautiful Game as their magnum opus, which includes the inspired opening one-two of a klezmer clarinet concerto followed by the ecstatic Jackson 5 pastiche Animal Spirits, but also includes all-out duds Aunt Leslie and Margery, My First Car. And, with nine years of distance, perhaps it’s time to accept that Conscious Club is less a hilarious in-joke and more like TikTok brainrot in disco form. Nonetheless, recent efforts were worse: the last two albums buried moments of brilliance with a glut of uninspired covers and rehashes of songs already released by Vulfpeck members. 2020’s record even went to the desperate measure of auctioning off one of its 10 tracks to the highest bidder. Let’s just say that $70,000 from New York band Earthquake Lights could have been put to better use.

Nonetheless, Vulfpeck remain my (and many of my jazz musician peers’) all-time favourite band. Their magic is best captured not in their albums, but their triumphant 2019 live album, which saw the band play their arsenal of timeless hits to a rabid Madison Square Garden. It had Chris Thile and Dave Koz’s mind-bending improv duel in Smile Meditation, Woody Goss’s knotty baroque solo in Wait for the Moment, Joe Dart performing bass guitar heroics on his calling card Beastly – all these moments and more are firmly the stuff of Vulf legend. Such is the struggle of being a Vulfpeck devotee in the 2020s: bandleader and principal songwriter Jack Stratton can produce pop gold, but too often he gets caught up chasing inane silliness, like on the band’s bizarre sauna-themed recent album.

Enter Clarity of Cal, the band’s surprise 2025 album, which comes with a promisingly simple premise: a live recording from their show at Hollywood Palladium last September. No bathtubs on the stage, no sauna hats, no lyrical references to whales with feet. In fact, for the most part, Clarity of Cal sees Stratton on remarkably well-behaved form. Sunshine-filled lead singles Big Dipper and Matter of Time announce a new level of songwriting sophistication: a tastefully intricate yacht-rock piano part, tightly written chord progressions, falsetto group vocals that summon the free-spirited soul of Earth, Wind and Fire. Matter of Time in particular is a gem that settles into a giddy two chord jam, Antwaun Stanley relieved of group vocal duties and free to belt out ad libs in the way only he can.

Like all Vulfpeck releases, listeners with a low cheese tolerance may still struggle with Clarity of Cal – Matter of Time‘s verse has a happy-clappy High School Musical feel to it, whilst strutting disco number In Real Life settles on the refrain “There’s only one way to party / And that’s with everybody”. In fact, the only real glimpses of subtlety can be found on the two tracks Stratton blatantly didn’t write. Can’t You Tell is a textbook Joey Dosik nice-guy ballad, but its exquisite slow-burn chorus – sounding like a stateside Gabriels – trumps his previous high water mark Running Away. Theo Katzman, a fine songwriter whose talents are often somewhat sidelined in the midst of Vulfpeck’s circus act, offers Tender Defender. It’s an essential downtempo moment in an album of sugary fun and features easily the stickiest chorus hook of the album. Even by Katzman’s own high standards, this is an exceptionally well-written and heart-warming piece about romantic devotion.

As Stratton is wont to do on recent Vulfpeck albums, the second half of Clarity of Cal is devoted largely to instrumental tracks. New Beastly pulls off the unlikely feat of being a worthy successor to Joe Dart’s infamous bass feature Beastly, although the amplified audience cheers for every last hit of Woody Goss’s cowbell stop being funny by about halfway through the second listen. La Gioconda recycles the progression from Matter of Time into a genuinely cheering vocal duet between Stanley and new recruit Jacob Jeffries, and Memories is a respectable update of the original from Cory Wong’s atrocious quasi-Vulfpeck album Wong’s Cafe.

So far so good. That is until the band blow it with pitiful closer This Is Not The Song I Wrote. Joey Dosik, now with a silly voice, returns to deliver a tale about musical plagiarism. The issue is, it’s very hard to write a song mocking uninspired songwriting without making an uninspired song in the process, and this irritating chorus sounds too trashy even to be ironic. It’s not that fully committed joke songs can never be good, but they need a degree of cleverness too. Instead, This Is Not The Song I Wrote sounds like a half-baked idea for a fun song stretched out to an excruciating three and a half minutes.

Still, Clarity of Cal and its accompanying live film is the best news any Vulfpeck fan has had in years, and arguably their best album of all time. Even better news would be the announcement of illusive UK tour dates – still a blank patch in Undertone’s gigs coverage. Clarity of Cal is far from perfect but, for now, this album offers plenty of reasons to rejoice.