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Wolf Eyes

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Wolf Eyes, “Dreams In Splattered Lines” (Disciples, 2023)

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This latest LP from Wolf Eyes is something of a major release for the duo, as they are currently celebrating their 25th year with “their first widely-distributed non-compilation album in six years.” Fittingly, Dreams In Splattered Lines is one of the project’s most compelling and sophisticated albums to date, which is likely the result of some recent developments that would have seemed absolutely unimaginable when the project first began (collaborating with a Pulitzer Prize winner, a viral video for a fashion company, sharing stages with jazz titans, a residency at The New York Public Library, etc.). The library residency in particular played an especially large role in shaping this album, as the duo built a number of new instruments while they were there and also spent a lot of time absorbing the Surrealism Beyond Borders exhibit at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Of course, the truly interesting bit is how inventively Nate Young and John Olson assimilated all their new ideas, as well as the fact that their more high art/avant-garde influences amusingly collide with a newfound fascination with how “hit songs” work. While Wolf Eyes have sporadically dazzled me over the years as a cool noise band, Dreams In Splattered Lines feels like the album where they have arguably become the spiritual heirs to Throbbing Gristle in channeling the best ideas of the 20th century avant-garde into a zeitgeist-capturing mirror of the times (a post-hope world of crumbling institutions and widespread alienation).

The album is billed as “a surreal dreamscape of disorienting sound collages, where hit songs are transformed into terrariums of sonic flora and decimated fauna,” which is a considerably more elegant description than my own “a masterfully choreographed ballet of shit.” The album itself is not shit, of course, but the sounds themselves are quite a cavalcade of rotten, shambling, broken, strangled, and ugly sounds conjured from inventively misused gear. The opening “Car Wash Two” is an especially illustrative example of the latter, as it “includes a Short Hands track playing on the car radio while waves of white noise and contact microphones are plunging into water buckets.” That trick was then coupled with an added “meta” twist: the recording was then “played in a car while going through an actual car wash” before it was ultimately layered and mixed in the studio. Notably, that piece is singled out as an example of the duo’s new “hit single” mindset, but that trait is only evident in an oblique way that involves terrariums. More immediately graspable, however, is the fact that almost every song on the album is distilled to a punchy two- or three-minute running time. On the lesser pieces, it can sometimes feel like a song is over before it gets a chance to make a deep impression, but the stronger pieces tend to regularly attain “all killer, no filler” nirvana.

While terms like “horror jazz” and “psycho jazz” have been used to describe Wolf Eyes many times before (presumably because of John Olson’s arsenal of self-built wind instruments), this is the first album that I have heard where the duo genuinely seem to evince the virtuosity of a visionary jazz unit. That virtuosity is admittedly not of the rhythmic, melodic, or harmonic variety, but I cannot think of many other artists that can pull off more impressive feats with texture (or who could even figure out how to use the duo’s eclectic arsenal of gear). The analogy that springs immediately to mind is that of practical special effects versus sophisticated CGI effects in horror films, as DIY gore can sometimes feel a lot more viscerally disturbing than digitized perfection. The same is true here, as plenty of artists get amazing sounds from expensive gear and powerful software, but Young and Olson regularly churn out wonderfully squelching, gnarled, and sickly sounds that no one else can get with their array of self-built instruments and convoluted chains of electronics. More importantly, they have a deep intuitive understanding of how to wield all those weird sounds, embracing a seething strain of minimalism that leaves plenty of space for each screech, gurgle, and splatter to be felt.

Unsurprisingly, the strongest pieces are those that most feel like songs, which tend to be those where Young delivers some kind of morbid deadpan monologue over a drum machine pattern strafed with sputtering, buzzing electronics and squalls of noise (such as “Exploding Time” and “My Whole Life”). That said, once the album starts to catch fire around the midpoint, just about every single song is noteworthy in some way. My favorite piece is a bit of an aberration, however, as “In Society” sounds like a bunch of Muppets were unknowingly dosed with LSD before covering Aaron Dilloway’s “Karaoke With Cal” and chaos ensued. I’m also quite fond of “Days Decay” though, as the thumping drum machine is a bit more muscular than usual and a Middle Eastern-sounding woodwind motif elusively surfaces in the seething undercurrent of machine noise like some kind of post-industrial Debussy homage. Obviously, it is not hard to become numb to Wolf Eyes’ vision, given their insanely voluminous discography and passion for messy spontaneity and experimentation, but the fact that their evolution is a bit overdocumented does not make that evolution any less impressive, as there are plenty of genuine flashes of outsider brilliance to be found on Dreams In Splattered Lines.

Listen here.

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Wolf Eyes, “Dread” (Lower Floor, 2018)

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Launching their Lower Floor imprint in 2017 has turned out to be one of the best ideas that Wolf Eyes have ever had, establishing a new outlet that thus far has a near-perfect track record of only releasing the band’s strongest and most coherent material. This latest installment, a reissue of an early masterwork from the Aaron Dilloway years, continues that hot streak beautifully. Dread is a murderers’ row of grimy, shambling, and ruined delights, featuring two absolute monster bookends with no filler or half-baked experiments in between. This album is broken, thuggish, and ugly in all the best ways—I cannot think of any other Wolf Eyes album quite as simultaneously focused and inspired as this one.

There is truly no better way to open a Wolf Eyes album than a piece like “Burn Your House Down,” in which Nate Young repeated howls that he is going to do exactly that over a shuddering and heaving mechanized nightmare held together by an obsessively swooping and plunging bass snarl. As brutal as it is, “Burn Your House Down” is perversely elegant in its simplicity: there is one strong motif and one (very) strong lyrical sentiment that relentlessly move forward through a howling chaos of broken beats, sputtering electronics, strangled feedback, and mangled samples. Also, it is a remarkably concise piece, as is the later “Let the Smoke Rise.”

On more recent albums, the band’s best material tends to take the shape of longer pieces, but Wolf Eyes had some of the lingering intuitions of a rock band at this stage and it suited them well: Dread is ostensibly a noise album, but it does not exactly feel like one, as there are skeletons of hooks, rhythms, and songs within its burning wreckage. Also, Young’s world-weary, stream-of-consciousness vocals give Wolf Eyes a humanity and charisma that is lacking in most other noise artists’ work (even if it is arguably an anti-charisma). There are certainly moments of brute force here, but Young, Dilloway, and John Olson generally worked quite hard to be menacing through mood and texture rather than raw power.

Even the longer pieces on Dread feel like ingeniously crafted “songs” rather than sprawling experiments—they just take a more slow-burning approach in which several broken and meandering threads unexpectedly converge into something of real power. The 14-minute “Desert of Glue/Wretched Hog” is an especially deft example of that, as it initially sounds like someone just dicking around with a thudding, go-nowhere drum machine pattern amidst some random electronic squiggles. 

Once Young’s vocals appear, however, it coheres into an endearingly lurching, sparse, and fitful pulse embellished by a surreal miasma of tape-based lunacy (elephant noises are an especially delightful recurring theme). At some point, it all seemingly dissolves into indulgent chaos, yet a stomping new beat soon reforms to resurgently bulldoze its way through a cacophony of splattering electronics and distressed-sounding didgeridoo. When Young reappears to announce that he is “coming on like a wretched mess,” he fucking means it and he is entirely correct.

I had a much harder time warming to the 11-minute “Half Animal, Half Insane” because it takes such a long time (roughly 8 minutes) to build up to its gloriously dumb and pummeling crescendo, but it is actually a dark horse candidate for the album’s coolest song. Once it catches fire, it feels like a compellingly grotesque caricature of meat-headed, “angry guy” rock—like Phil Anselmo bravely soldiering though Pantera’s final song at a gig where all the instruments are broken and on fire and a chittering swarm of robotic insects has engulfed the audience.

The album closes with its second brilliant “single,” the 4-minute “Let the Smoke Rise.”It shares the deceptively elegant (if slime-coated) simplicity of the album’s opener, but lowers the intensity to a bubbling simmer: the piece is little more than Young’s sneering and nihilistic anti-poetry over an erratic and heaving groove that sounds like a poorly built machine on its last legs. Also, one of the lines sounds a lot like “Baby, I’m Oedipal,” which is very amusing. In any case, it is the fourth great song in a row on Dread: all killer, no filler. I dearly wish I had heard this album sooner.

Like many people, I first encountered Wolf Eyes with 2004’s Burned Mind. I liked it, but it definitely did not motivate me to try to track down the bands’ earlier releases, as I would never have guessed that Wolf Eyes were much better a few years earlier (for one or two albums, at least). I love some of their recent albums too, so it is debatable whether Dread is Wolf Eyes’ absolute zenith, but I have no doubts about whether it is essential (it is). 

Dread is a perfect and improbable confluence of disparate aesthetics that no one else could ever replicate: a potent and visceral collision of high-brow and low-brow that deftly avoids the weaknesses of either. There is nothing else quite like Wolf Eyes at their peak, an experience akin to being stomped by a violent biker gang over a disagreement about their views on musique concrète or Jacques Derrida’s indirect influence on underground rock.

Samples can be found here.
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Wolf Eyes, “Strange Days II” (Lower Floor, 2017)

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I am very much enjoying this new chapter of Wolf Eyes’ career, as this second release on their Lower Floor imprint is every bit as deliciously wrong-sounding as Undertow, yet breaks some intriguing new ground. The world is littered with iconic noise artists who flogged their one great idea to death and it is refreshing to see that John Olson, Nate Young, and James Baljo seem quite hellbent on avoiding that fate these days. Granted, Strange Days II is only a lean 20-minute EP, but it is enough of a compelling detour to justify its existence despite that: it may be brief, but it is a complete and coherent statement. As with most recent Wolf Eyes fare, it would be quite a stretch to call Strange Days II “noise,” yet the trio definitely apply the genre’s tactics to unleash a corroded, thudding, and dystopian caricature of jazz (or at least a pleasingly gnarled twist on Zoviet France-style sci-fi tribalism).

The meat of this EP is essentially just the opening 12-minute “011817,” so it would probably be more accurate to describe Strange Days II as “the hot new Wolf Eyes single” rather an EP. It is followed by a shorter second piece in the same vein (“011317”), but it kind of feels like a looser, proto-version of its predecessor. I am totally fine with that though: substantial releases are nice, but so are releases that just have one or two great songs to deliver and do not linger around overstaying their welcome (I am the absolute last person who would complain about Wolf Eyes belatedly embracing quality over quantity). Of course, Wolf Eyes are still Wolf Eyes, so “011817” still feels more like an improvisatory and amorphous vamp rather than a tightly crafted composition, but that looseness works in their favor here, adding to the lurching, distended, and diseased-sounding feel of the piece. 

The only real surprise is that John Olson’s vaguely Eastern-sounding flute theme is quite melodic and languorous, which makes an intriguing juxtaposition with the underlying groove. That has led to at least one major reviewer favorably comparing Strange Days II to Miles Davis, which is definitely something I did not see coming. My favorite aspect is definitely that juxtaposition of two seemingly incompatible aesthetics, but I also enjoy the stuttering, bass-heavy throb of the piece on its own, as it seems to be constantly stumbling and changing. In fact, it favorably recalling Chris Carter’s rhythmic genius in Throbbing Gristle: the imperfections and idiosyncrasies make the beat sound like the work of massive, clanking, wheezing, and sentient machine rather a loop or programmed pattern. I am a huge fan of brokenness and precarious structure in music, which are certainly two areas where Wolf Eyes excel.

As alluded to earlier, the shorter “011317” feels like a slightly less successful earlier stab at the exact same thing, but it also feels far more deserving of classic jazz comparisons. For one, Olson unleashes an impressively competent and melodic saxophone solo, albeit one leaning much more towards free jazz. Also, the percussive element collapses into skittering, clattering entropy rather than cohering into a throbbing pulse. It is certainly not fluid or virtuosic enough to feel like real free jazz (nor would Wolf Eyes want that), but the layered chaos and guitar noise at least approximate something like an industrial-damaged The Dead C jamming with a saxophone player. 

That is admittedly an aesthetic I can get behind, but it is not quite as impressive as a melancholy flautist being flattened by strafing swoops of electronic noise and a mechanized, stumbling juggernaut of a groove (which is what the first piece sounds like). Also, the opener sneakily conceals a very deliberate arc amidst all its shambling and sputtering, as guitarist Jim Baljo unveils a repeating and epic-sounding motif in the piece’s final moments to pull it all together into a climax of sorts (rather than just meandering into silence).

Obviously, the sheer brevity of Strange Days II ensures that it is a fairly minor release in the voluminous Wolf Eyes’ canon, but it certainly does not sound like anything else coming out these days and “011817” would easily secure a place in my imaginary, self-curated best-of collection. In a perverse way, Wolf Eyes have transcended their role as the DIY flagbearers for the darkest corners of the American underground and become the possible sound of the future—certainly not the future that anyone wants, mind you, but a hopelessly broken, dark, and post-apocalyptic one. With Strange Days II, it is easy to envision Wolf Eyes as the house band in a bombed-out subterranean cabaret in something like Total Recall, raggedly and lethargically playing “jazz” to a drugged, dead-eyed crowd with a rusted and salvaged battery of inappropriate equipment that makes all the wrong sounds.

Listen here.

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Wolf Eyes, “Undertow” (Lower Floor, 2017)

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I am only a casual Wolf Eyes fan, so the bulk of their endless tide of releases passes by me unnoticed. ¬Every couple of years, however, they unleash something big to remind everyone that they are just as relevant as ever and continuing to tirelessly evolve. The latest salvo in that vein is ostensibly this one, which also happens to be the inaugural release for the band’s new Lower Floor Music imprint. Appropriately, the two bookend pieces share a lot of common ground with the better moments of 2013’s No Answer : Lower Floors, eschewing noise for something resembling deconstructed rock music that has gone sick and wrong. When it sticks to that template, Undertow is quite good, but the more abstract and sketchlike material separating its two highlights makes for a somewhat uneven whole.

There are a lot of esoteric strains of underground music colliding on Undertow‘s opening title piece, but none of them feels particularly like noise. That is neither a good nor bad thing, but James Baljo-era Wolf Eyes can seem an awful lot like a rock band (or at least a “trip metal” band, as they would describe themselves). Structurally, “Undertow” is basically just a simple and slow stoner metal bass line endlessly repeated beneath Nate Young’s deadpan, misanthropic, and existential dread-filled monologue (“I count every deceit as they repeat like receipts of doom”). 

There is some distinctively un-rock activity happening in the periphery, however, like subtly buzzing electronics and reverb-soaked howls from John Olson’s self-built wind instruments. Still, for the most part, the piece essentially feels like a skeletal Black Sabbath jamming with a terminally depressed beat poet and a heroin-impaired saxophonist. That is perhaps not an aesthetic that many are clamoring to replicate, but it works just fine for Wolf Eyes: though Young’s vocals probably verge on (possibly intended) self-parody, their blasé cool fits well with the broken, stuck-in-neutral feel of the groove. Also, in a weird way, the piece is a lot hookier than most of Wolf Eyes’ deconstruction-happy contemporaries such as The Dead C. It is almost like they could casually toss off catchy songs if they felt like it, but are not particularly happy about it at all.

Of course, the next three pieces show that Wolf Eyes are even more adept at tossing off non-catchy non-songs. Clocking in under two minutes, “Laughing Tides” is little more than a forgettable interlude of strangled whines and creaking strings over a random-sounding backdrop of whooshes and squelches. It is hard to believe that they did not have anything stronger that they could have included instead, but it is probably just a space-filler necessitated by the vinyl format. Still, the following “Texas” is roughly more of the same, though it is twice as long and at least throws in an eerie flute-like melody. It kind of sounds like a rotting orchestra of the undead tuning up for a performance that never starts. 

Remarkably, the perplexing trend of false-starts continues unabated with “Empty Island,” which sounds like a Jamaican dub producer who willfully set out to do everything as wrongly as possible: the groove is sluggish and gutted, the percussion is non-existent, and Olson’s ghostly haze of horns occasionally duels with Baljo’s anachronistic metal-damaged noodling and shredding. Exasperatingly, none of those pieces are particularly derivative, uninspired, or indicative of a lack of vision. Rather, they all just kind of stop before developing into anything substantial enough to be rewarding.

Thankfully, that trend is reversed with the closing epic “Thirteen,” which gamely revisits the slow-motion groove and spoken-word aesthetic of “Undertow,” but stretches out for almost 14 minutes. Instead of a strong bass line this time around, there is a wobbly and gnarled repeating chord, yet otherwise the template is the same. The sole significant difference is merely that Olson, Young, and Baljo actually hang around long enough to use their groove as a jumping off point into something more. 

In this case, the “something more” is increasingly distorted and warped vocals and an almost free-jazz degree of howling and echoing horns from Olson. Disorientingly, Baljo sometimes seems like he is playing a completely different song when he is not laying down murky slabs of power chord sludge, which adds nicely to the escalating sense of wrongness and disquiet. At its zenith, it sounds an awful lot like a flock of drugged geese circling a malfunctioning tape player, an aesthetic I very much enjoy. 

In fact, pieces like “Thirteen” are exactly why I keep buying Wolf Eyes albums. I just wish there were more of them here. In fact, I wish there was more of anything here, as Undertow is under half an hour long and almost half of it feels like filler thrown together in an afternoon. I suppose that is the fundamental caveat with Wolf Eyes though: they could not have churned out 300 releases if they made a habit of lingering on ideas long enough to bring out their full potential. As a fan, my expectation is merely that an occasional gem will sometimes surface from the endless messy torrent spewing forth from Wolf Eyes’ bleak and disturbed collective psyche. With “Thirteen” at least, they have added one more to the pile.

Listen here.

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Wolf Eyes, “No Answer : Lower Floors” (De Stijl, 2013)

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I have not been paying much attention to Wolf Eyes for the last several years, but I was inclined to give this album a chance after repeatedly hearing all about how it is both a bold change of direction and a major statement on the state of noise in 2013. After listening to it a few times, I guess it is arguably both, but it is definitely not some kind of epoch-defining revelation, nor is it a particularly great album (though it certainly has some great moments). Rather it is merely an uneven, intermittently inspired effort that displays a new penchant for ruined-sounding ultra-minimalism, but offers only a few fully realized, successful examples of it amidst too much filler.

I have to hand it to Wolf Eyes: they certainly subverted my expectations a bit with the opening “Choking Flies,” as I expected the future of noise to sound a hell of a lot noisier, or at least more ferocious. Instead, “Flies” sounds a lot like decayed and deconstructed rock that has been stripped to its barest skeleton, then uglified. More specifically, it sounds like Nate Young remixed a Girls Against Boys album by removing the guitars, then left the tapes out in the sun to melt together with a Throbbing Gristle album. 

As dubious as that may sound, the result is still distinctly, wonderfully “Wolf Eyes,” as the ugly throbbing bass swells, out-of-sync dual-tracked vocals, hollow thump, clattering electronics, and ugly drifting notes combine to form a masterfully wrong and ill-intentioned whole. If that momentum had sustained, No Answer: Lower Floors could have been quite a stellar album.

Unfortunately, it did not, as the remaining five songs are a mixed bag both stylistically and quality-wise. “Born Liar,” for example, is a thudding guitar and horn squall that sounds like it could have been made up and recorded on the spot. That is followed by a very brief interlude of mangled speech and bleeping (“No Answer”), then a piece (“Chattering Lead”) that is essentially a meandering, less successful variation on the “Choking Flies” formula, all of which illustrates what is so exasperating about this album: the first two-thirds are over before I even realize what happened and the only truly significant piece is the first one.

Thankfully, the trio get things back on track again with the epic “Confessions of the Informer,” which is both the album’s most aggressively minimal piece and its clear highlight. It is built upon a little more than a slow-motion, repeating throb and stuttering snatches of vocals, coupled with queasy squeals from John Olsen self-made horns and guitar feedback from new member James Baljo…and that is about it. 

That proves to be more than enough though—while not much overt evolution occurs over the course of its 12 minutes, it is so mesmerizingly ravaged, limping, and haunted that it could have gone on for twice as long and still been just as great (or better). I suspect it sounds a lot like wandering nervously through a ruined space station must feel: alone and paranoid in an endless corridor of jagged metal, flickering lights, and eerie creaks and moans. That is a great niche to stake out.

Naturally, after having delivered something so wonderful, the band felt that the only proper way to close the album was to give their ugliest, most contrarian impulses free-reign, as “Warning Sign” basically feels like a 7-minute locked-groove of grinding, unlistenable, air-raid-siren-style pain. I suppose that is both amusing and fitting, but another good song would have been nice too. As it stands, I guess I will have to settle for just two great songs and four not-so-great ones, which probably eliminates this as a strong contender for noise album of the year (even if “Confessions” is admittedly brilliant). 

Of course, delivering a perfectly sequenced, uniformly great statement of intent would run counter to Wolf Eyes’ whole messy aesthetic of spontaneity, entropy, and primitivism, so I cannot complain much—I knew very much what I was getting into and I got it. I am very pleased to see that Wolf Eyes are just as capable of greatness and innovation as ever, even if their more frustrating characteristics remain just as evident.

Listen here.