I normally don't like guitars with this much bling . . . and I don't particularly like abalone. I own an Agile AL-3010 SE in a root beer finish and the blue and purple hues in the abalone look sickly and garish against that earthy backdrop. I've actually thought about putting MOP stickers over the abalone inlays of that Agile. However, I find that abalone, if you are going to us it, is eminently suited to the blue burst finish of this Wolf guitar. If this were an Agile, then Kurt might call it "Ocean Burst," though it would be a batch of said finish that came in a little darker around the edges, closer to what Gibson calls "Blueberry."
Some quick research leads me to believe that this guitar was made sometime between 2019 and just before the present. I say this because it has features that were introduced around 2019, including a bone nut and a neck constructed of three strips of wood. Yet I know it is not of the most recent construction because it has the discontinued wolf logo headstock, which I much prefer. Speaking of discontinued, I'll betcha that Gibson correct horn will be gone in 3 . . . 2 . . . 1 . . . You know that AIO has to have already received scary letters from Big G's lawyers over that.
The neck feels exactly like an MIK Unsung manufactured Epiphone LP I own with a 1960 profile. It's almost like Wolf used the exact same specs for the WLP.
The pickups sound quite nice, with pleasing musical overtones and no harshness. In a word I'd describe them as "smooth." The bridge is 14.5 K ohms resistance and the neck 7.9 K. Overall the guitar has a thick, warm, darker tone, by which I do not mean "muddy," but rather that it has a sound one would expect from a Les Paul.
AIO, who is the sole distributor of these instruments, touts the meticulous in house set-up they perform on every instrument. As I purchased this guitar 2nd hand, there is no way to know if it has been adjusted since leaving AIO's facility. That being said, the Wolf guitar in my possession is set-up perfectly. The action is excellent; it is intonated spot-on; the frets are perfectly level, polished, and dressed, with zero fret sprout or sharpness.
The inevitable comparison of this Wolf is with an Agile, and it is indeed much closer to an Agile than it is to, say, a Harley Benton or a Firefly. It has the solidity and heft, dare I say, chunkiness and weight, of a golden age Agile. I have read a lot of things about the Wolf WLP that I want to be true, though which I cannot verify. For instance, that they are made in South Korea, and that the pickups are A2. Having this guitar in my hands, and having some amount of experience, I can believe these things I've read; I mean, my perception does not convince me that they are not true. But it is such a blurry line between perception and reality for us idle dreamers who feel compelled to piddle away the hours of our lives on music, lost in a world of representation, studying the art of manipulating others with sound. All you really need to know is that I really like this guitar, that I keep returning to it like a lovestruck schoolboy, and that it'll be tagging along with me to my gigs this weekend. That much, at least, is true.
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