By March 16, 2006
Wolf Eyes aren’t metal, and they’re about as goth as a chest wound. Wolf Eyes might not even make music. Since 1997, the band has been eschewing proper critical definition with a tortuous tail of CD-Rs, cassettes, and LPs. Disguntled, most critics toss the band into the wormhole of the experimental music scene: the “noise” genre.
While Wolf Eyes may not identify themselves as a member of this rarified sect, they certainly aren’t avoiding the classification. Their music embraces seething electronic screeches, syrupy vocals, and cavernous echoes that may lead you to question the progenitor of their electronic manipulations: man or machine? If you’re in need of a challenge, brandish your moleskine and make your way to the Noyes Community Center tonight, where Wolf Eyes will busy themselves with effacing your every attempt at classification.
Though Wolf Eyes may put fear into the hearts of pop lovers, the band is far from arrhythmic. Minimalist grooves can be found writhing beneath the skin of many of their releases, especially their “high profile” albums Dead Hills, Burned Mind, and Dread. Their primal beats often invite foot stomping and torso convulsing; at times, they command it. If you’re willing to loosen the collar a bit, Wolf Eyes’ sounds will prove as cathartic as they are challenging. This is some potent stuff.
The group found widespread recognition in 2003, after Sub Pop Records (home of indie darlings The Shins and Postal Service) contracted them for a full-length album. Wolf Eyes presented Sub Pop with their most haunting album yet, full of sinister soundscapes as frightening and invigorating as the best scenes in horror cinema. Try envisioning the horned beast that lassoed Gandalf in LoTR; now imagine the sound of him bounding towards you while lashing at you with his plasma whip. That’s the title-track. The album lifts this and eight other sound collages from an imaginary Gomorrah and ties them together judiciously, never loosening a death-grip.
After tweezering Burned Mind from your disc drive, drop in an earlier effort, Dead Hills, and prepare for a bath in the sound of urban decay. The second track off Dead Hills, deftly titled “Dead Hills 2,” opens with a pogo-stick drum beat that sounds as if it fell from an 8-story building. As these monster beats multiply, an electronic slash is added to the mix, and soon vocal sludge oozes into the mechanical stew. Taking to the West Coast with the next cut, “Rotten Tropics,” the band lets boulder-sized beats ricochet over an L.A. already polluted with sewage and white noise riffs.
Sounds kind of depressing, huh? While I wouldn’t bring a Wolf Eyes disc to the next family picnic, the band isn’t all about terror and woe. The impressive sounds conjured up on their records may just leave you uproariously happy. To hear a band pushing the limits of “modern music” is quite a treat. Wolf Eyes explores the shrinking gap between technology and humanity in the information age. It happens to be a scary subject. Wolf Eyes is just here to remind you.
By March 16, 2006
Featuring covers of a 700-year-old Pakistani Qawwali song (“Sahib Teri Band/Maki Madni”), a traditional blues-folk tune (“Crow Jane”), and a Jamaican reggae number (“Sailing On”), calling Songlines diverse would be like calling MTV lame – a real understatement.
Likewise, to say that Derek Trucks may be one of the most talented guitarists in history is an equally offensive underexaggeration. In “I’d Rather Be Blind, Crippled & Crazy” the drums kick it off with a beat that’s atypical but intuitive: you’ve never heard it before, but you can get down to it. The guitar shows up to the party early and goes to get a drink. Next the bass drops its wah-wah’d round-and-out pulsing groove-line into the scene. The old-school Hammond organ in the corner stammers out a funked-in way-out played-off-the-drums chant, lets out a scream, then the guitar jumps out on the floor. At first you think the six-string spent too much time at the bar with the backup singer, but nah, its cool: effects switch over and beat stays bumpin’. This song is for groovin’.
“Sahib Teri Band/Maki Madni” is a complex composition. Right off the bat I feel like I’m in the intro to Santana’s “Abraxas”, except Trucks’s guitar line is more full and powerful: brimming with the latent energy of a uranium mine. When the anxious drum beat enters, you realize you’re actually strapped to an Acme rocket. Before you see the coyote off to the side laughing, the rocket takes off with Road Runner’s speed: one minute your flying thousands of feet high through Icarian arpeggios, just to suddenly drop into subterranean depths to a place where notes flow like molten lava. Returning, you barely crack the surface into a purgatory where microtones pour out of the searing slide guitar like warm honey and dirt: mellifluous and sweet but gritty and rough.
“Chevrolet” is barely two minutes tall, but I’ll be damned if you aren’t singin’ along, drummin’ on your leg and stomping a foot by the end of this back-alley blues wailer. If “Chevrolet” were a witch’s brew the recipe would be one tablespoon grit, one part gospel choir from concentrate, the blues of two blindmen, three shots of B-151, and B.B. King’s left leg.
“Sailing On” is relaxed, just-finished-your-last-final-relaxed. Sunny-Sunday-afternoon-without-a-worry-relaxed. Now your might get the brilliance of this album: no other can make you feel this way. Trucks can.
The Sky is a melody shows how power can emerge from notes perfectly placed. The vocals remind me of one of Dave Matthew’s old (i.e., not sold-out mainstream crap) songs. The saxophone-guitar-flute combo just works: the emergence of each instrument from a harmonious nucleus feels like an expansion out of the an organic core into the ambient space in the back of your mind’s ear.
In the beginning the world was sung into existence by totemic elders who wondered about singing out the names of everything, giving the cosmos order, form, and beauty. The paths they walked were Songlines.