If Tom Waits had walked into a smoky harbor bar in Hamburg to deconstruct the night with a jazz band, it might have sounded like this: Wellbad ain’t no project, it’s a condition: dark, sweat-soaked, restless. Sometimes it creeps, sometimes it strikes. Daniel Welbat – voice and storm center of the band – doesn’t sing so much as rasp, dig, conjure. With his rough-edged, cinematic presence, he guides us through a sonic world of urban blues, dirty soul, and shadow-heavy jazz rock (and no, definitely not the elevator-music kind), woven between harbor lights and headlight-blindness. Wellbad sounds like being on a rusty freighter, adrift in the current, somewhere between yesterday and now, engine failure, but crystal-clear sight. This band is not the soundtrack, it’s the film. To hear them is to descend into that other layer. Deeper. Stygian. Truer.