Forward-thinking rockers have always taken cues from noise bands. Kurt Cobain’s infatuation with a Japanese noise group, the Boredoms, led to some of Nirvana’s most blazingly original distorto-tones (this tendency was pushed further by Steve Albini’s engineering on In Utero). Countless other straight(ish) rock groups follow similar aesthetic wanderings: within Sonic Youth’s waves of churning guitar distortion and with Kevin Shields’ illumination of guitar noise on My Bloody Valentine’s Loveless.
On Ann Arbor, Mich., noise group Wolf Eyes’ latest release (and debut drop for Sub Pop Records), Burned Mind, the trio of noise fetishists plunge listeners deep into a world of industrial sludge and bombastic sonic assaults without resorting to conventional rock structure or songwriting.
Wolf Eyes began as Nate Young releasing extremely limited cassette tapes in 1997. His recordings were comprised of electronic noise blasts and nascent sounds from constructed instruments. Aaron Dilloway soon joined up with Young, birthing abstract attacks from tapes, horns and other equipment. In 2000, Wolf Eyes became a trio as John Olson joined the group for its CD-R release of With Spykes (Spykes being new member John Olson). Olson’s record label American Tapes (Dilloway also has a label called Hanson Records) released 20 new cassettes in 2001, and the group’s output has hardly slowed down, resulting in more than 40 unique releases (on cassette, compact disc, CD-R and vinyl, among other media) since Wolf Eyes’ inception in 1997.
Burned Mind shows a slight shift away from Wolf Eyes’ earlier efforts, affording the group a highly listenable single with “Stabbed in the Face.” But a few glossy production upgrades hardly turns Wolf Eyes into the latest Clear Channel fodder.
Burned Mind begins with a rolling silent inversion of a track called “Dead in a Boat,” which develops into a short spasm of white noise before morphing itself into “Stabbed in the Face.” The aural equivalent of “Tetsuo: Iron Man” meshed into J.G. Ballard’s novel “Crash” (which also inspired Mick Jones during the writing of the Clash’s London Calling), Burned Mind explores the experience of death and destruction, finding sex and expansion within both. And although an appeal to melody is sometimes painfully in need of, the album delivers a solid jolt to any listener’s idea of music.
The disc begins with a violent explosion, a car crash orchestra of cyborg entrails. The tracks “Stabbed in the Face,” “Reaper’s Gong” and “Village Oblivia” can be seen as the act of dying a violent death, where metal collides with flesh. This is most evident on the almost-listener-friendly “Stabbed in the Face.” The song is filled with a pounding death-squelch bass line and very human wails suffocating under a sheath of electric slosh and screaming tape manipulation. “Reaper’s Gong” is a quiet bubbling of analog hiss and broken machinery that eventually bleeds itself out and into the slow-building, morgue-meat sing-along of “Village Oblivia.” The resulting sound could be a cross-pollination of Sonic Youth’s Bad Moon Rising and the soundtrack for some vaguely artsy shock-horror film. Vocals simply become a part of the machine, churning along without a physical body to connect with.
“Urine Burn” begins the second half of the album, now focused on the physical remains of a being after death, with song titles reading like a crime-scene clean-up report: “Black Vomit,” “Urine Burn” and “Burned Mind.” “Rattlesnake Shake” is an audio landscape of distant hums and squeaks, tied together by a rhythm that resembles nothing less than a massive, electro-bionic rattlesnake. The ominous song ends with a final, blasting squelch and leaks into the siren-laden emergency of “Burned Mind.” “Ancient Delay” is a reflective, almost meditative song. Consisting of a simple rolling bruise of distorted analog, every additional noise adds a surprising amount of atmospheric depth. “Black Vomit” is the bookend, that matches up with “Stabbed in the Face” to complete the album (not including the secret 13th track). What begins as a lulling alien whisper-beat, eventually evaporates into a noise orgy similar to Negative Approach’s fiercest experiments.
With Burned Mind, Wolf Eyes delivers an album that will blast out eardrums and freak out your parents. And isn’t that what great rock ‘n’ roll is all about?
Grade: B
