HUMAN ANIMAL by WOLF EYES

The following review was disallowed from an esteemed online music magazine because when asked for my favourite bands of each decade since the sixties, I included Abba in the 'seventies' list. It seems that as a system of weeding out rogue elements, such a quiz is second to none. I of course knew this would be the case. I of course knew that the mention of Abba would cause furrowings of their brown brows. But I listed them anyway. Self-Savagery in practice. Which reminds me:

Self Savagery no 465: A common myth is that successful people just 'act as themselves.' The truth of course, is that successful people just act at acting as themselves. Self-Savagery suggests that merely being yourself is a sure-fire way to find the land of beautiful rejection and gorgeous poverty, and so is encouraged at all times.

HUMAN ANIMAL-WOLF EYES

Or: How I learned to Stop Burrowing and Love the Womb; for within the filthy sanctuary
of their own fried brains, Wolf Eyes are settling ever more snugly into a nauseous template of churning death rattle ambience. They’ve patrolled these weirder shores for a while, volunteering for the shifts few ever seem up to and carrying out their chores with verve.
Some are out there with them, of course. Whereas a band like liars deal in a kind of spooked awe at the unknown, hoping to call up and describe spirits with their drums, Wolf Eyes are themselves concerned with producing the sound of horror; Whereas liars evoked a childlike supplication to mystical promise on their last two records, Wolf Eyes reach for the source, and conjure up the beast itself.
Why create something so horrible? A grand defence might evoke such taboo-challengers as Pasolini and the Marquis de Sade, and suggest that Wolf Eyes are providing us with a continuation of a canon that confronts and stares down our fears. As horror writer Clive Barker put it- ‘At best you can hold death at bay; you can pretend it isn’t there; but to deny it totally is a sickness.’
But stop. Wolf Eyes just a bunch of nerds amusing themselves with toys aren’t they? The musical equivalent of adolescents painting portraits in intestinal red and brown tones to scare their sisters. But what, pray tell, could be more noble and heroic than that?
Whereas liars (a band, I have to say, who sound nothing like Wolf Eyes, but who aesthetically overlap enough to offer as a counterweight) pitched their shrines with a certain naive hope to underpin the rumble of voodoo, Wolf Eyes bury theirs in spiteful dirty protests. Texture, texture, texture, dense as one thousand mantras, rendered A Burned Mind a wonderfully horrid and confused listen, the crusting fuzz borne from a genesis of, one imagines, hybrid technologies and interbred machineries.
A Million Years, the opener on Human Animal, however dispenses with the ectoplasmal fuzz from the previous record, leaving a sparse torture chamber of cranking, fidgeting metal. Thence forth emerges the sound of Satan’s coffee percolator, bringing with it a lusty brew to the boil. It seems there’s been a wiping down of the decks, a burning off of the hot stubble. But then the title track has that explosive yet buried horror of yore, drums limping like Long John Silver with the roars of the undead ringing in his head, the sounds of King Tut's curse. Not a quick predator, but a stuttering, disorientated one, like a Mummy freed after 10,000 years, but with time to kill. Gloopy production lends it the film of something more biodegradable than other processed electronica. There is jellied flesh on these bones. It’s the simultaneous directness and vagueness that captivates when Wolf Eyes are at their best; the ability to produce stompalong fratboy fuckfests and smear them with gore, rendering them appealing to both (and probably neither) fans of hardcore noise and detached ambience; two opposing schools are forced to wrestle together.
If A Million Years is Bundy in a wind-tunnel after the fact, then Lake of Roaches, charged with staticky screams, is a communiqué from a disinterested alien race. The quite deliciously titled Rusted Mange carries Wolf Eyes’ full visceral assault, with kicking kickdrums like popping eardrums, before squeals of alien birds overawe the set. Leper War evokes the cold woods, with it’s rustling noises in the distance. The Driller starts like a flatulent John Carpenter, with echoing percussion evoking a misfiring hell cart and gleaming feedback synth sounds only a dog could hear, before a stomping demon puts his size tens all over it. Bonus track and live favourite Noise Not Music, a cover of a No Fucker tune, serves simultaneously as a simple title with which to hang the whole thing on, and (to these bruised ears at least) the most direct and straight piece of work here.
‘Here am I: at one stroke incestuous, adulteress, sodomite, and all that in a girl who only lost her maidenhead today! What progress, my friends... with what rapidity I advance along the thorny road of vice!’ So the Marquis de Sade announced proudly; and in his great claims for abusive, horrible selfish behaviour, de Sade captures what those who enjoy Wolf Eyes know; there is greatness in such putrid pathetic horror. Get stupid, children.