Wolf Eyes
w/Chromatics, Climax Golden Twins, Vermilion
Thurs March 20, Crocodile, $10.
There are innumerable forms of heinously fucked, unbearably abrasive, and ultimately wonderful music making up the modern American freak rock underground. There's the triumph of heavy noise that is RI's Lightning Bolt, Kentucky's Hair Police (who should just change their name to "apeshit"), the bad-trip Bronson-rock of NYC's Sightings, and all the no wave dance bands coming out of San Francisco, to cite but a few, but one noise is a door that no one should have opened. I'm talking about the Ann Arbor, Michigan-spawned electronic hate music of Wolf Eyes, who are coming to town, and if you know what's good for you, you will get your ass down to their show, stand up close, and pay attention, goddammit. Wolf Eyes is the sort of music that you need to let take over. I had to play their records about five million times before they became anything besides a bunch of thumping sounds, and it really didn't start making sense until I saw them play live. But I'll tell you, when I did see this band, the fucking scary party they threw onstage made me want to tear my clothes off and paint my body with the blood of a wild animal I killed with my bare hands. Do you know that feeling? It's a good one.
Formed in Ann Arbor in 1997, Wolf Eyes are kind of a noise scene supergroup. Guitarmaster Aaron Dilloway was the winged frontman for the legendary Pterodactyls--a band so retarded they spelled their own name wrong on their record; beatmaster Nate Young was in the seminal electro-noise outfit Nautical Almanac; and headbangermaster John Olson was in the totally bizarro handmade electronics/ tape hiss band American Tapes. They started out releasing cassettes on their own Hanson Records label, part of a murky tape-trading scene that has been going on in the Midwest for the past few years. A full-length on Bulb Records followed in 1999, and since then there's been a spray of material released--a CD collection of early stuff from Hanson called Slicer, a split 12-inch with Crack: We Are Rock, some compilation appearances, and a new full-length on Troubleman Unlimited called Dead Hills.
The band creates a spacy, stoned trip through the bad part of town, with handmade electronic noise boxes, drum machines, and a few once-traditional instruments like guitar and horn, but the guitar is all fucked up, gutted and reassembled so it doesn't sound like a guitar anymore, and the horn is this giant Viking-looking thing that Olson made out of random parts and scrap metal. Dilloway plays the gutted guitar, hitting its mangled strings with plates, cymbals, and his face. He screams a lot, too. Young programs the beats and sings about violence and fuck-everything feelings with a nasally, growling voice that often breaks into unsettling shrieks. Olson stands off to one side with a suitcase full of wires and knobs in front of him. He twiddles the knobs and bangs his head. All three members have duct-taped noise boxes in front of them and they all constantly twiddle knobs.
What they do is simple. They start with one beat, throbbing over and over ominously, and then there are these careening, ricocheting noises and repetitions that build on one another. The songs always start with the music appearing to be a series of totally unrelated sounds, then more sounds are dropped in, and then more and more, until there is this giant, slowly moving groove, a brutal trudge made up of these really evil-sounding noises.
Those noises are a big part of why Wolf Eyes stand so far out from the pack. They are razor sharp, sweaty, and fucking miles away from all the laptop squiggles of five zillion art students wearing fluorescent green costumes. They literally breathe, and they make the music downright creepy.
When they're performing, Olson puts his whole body into the beat and Dilloway jumps around like a chimpanzee, bleating and shrieking. There is an energy that comes off the stage, this cathartic elation, and with all this insanity going down--the throbbing beat, the screams and squelches, and the completely inexplicable presence of some kind of satanic disco rhythm that erupts--the only word that comes close to describing the situation is power. Definitely power. Or chaos, I don't know which. Maybe it's power-chaos.
