Wolf Eyes - Undertow

The Quietus

Your favourite voraciously prolific cottage industry of errant noise art reveals its latest fugitive deformity. Now comprised of founding member Nate Young, John ‘Inzane’ Olson and Jim Baljo, though prone to contributions from former cohorts Aaron Dilloway and Mike Connelly, the Wolf Eyes troupe find themselves in a privileged position after 2015’s I Am A Problem: Mind In Pieces. A record that tore into a barrelling cement mixer scuzz that, in its brutal, mind-rinsing rotation, felt like an abject alliance between dub, metal, psych, hardcore and avant-jazz, ending up appearing on, of all places, Jack White’s Third Man Records. Yet that unlikely link-up did little to compromise their throttle and their derangement, their propensity for straight up smash and grab and strung out mystification. Here they mark the inception of their own label, Lower Floor Music, with a record just as obstinately unruly, but in this instance it’s a work that bespeaks enervated energies and far-gone trajectories rather than searing barrages, a sweltering electrical storm that, instead of concerted fire, sows its creative destruction slowly and intensely.

Contrary to the instinct for pounding drums and frayed-wire overload exhibited on their last outing, Undertow feels devitalised and oppressed, the sound of what it feels like to be backed into a corner – a vicious baring of teeth in an enclosed space. As the lyric and the mood of ‘Thirteen’ suggests, the consequence of severe estrangement and disillusionment, ‘when the fumes become you.’

That’s not to say that in this creeping morass of despoiled drone and lethal cacophonic buzz there isn’t a perverse, submersible power. Just like the lingering moments of I Am A Problem… – the outernational dislocation of ‘Catching The Real Train’, the denuded, deteriorated psychedelia of ‘Cynthis Vortex aka Trip Memory Illness’ – this is singed, brooding, unwilling to gratify a desire for thrash and surge, but voltaic and impossible to suppress.

The title track makes that clear from the beginning. Insectoid fizz enflames the mordant, hellish gravitas of a few spare, stout strums and liberal contortions of form and orientation that sound like amplified scrapings of metal and fourth dimension free jazz begin a record mired in a dread that drawls and drags its feet but relents little. The lyrics of the introduction serve as an indication of the state of the band’s collective headspace: ‘Well I spent too much time stepping outside/That place is never gonna change.’ Professions of wasted time, mortality and resentment follow till the conclusive question rings out: ‘Don’t you see there’s nothing left to forget?’. It doesn’t feel like the insulated denial of a band disengaged from the here and now and it certainly doesn’t sound like one, more like a bleak, caustic jolt to the system, an abrasive kneading of the skull with sparks spitting in a screwed time zone.

In the same way that a Throbbing Gristle record often couples elongated mood pieces with short, sharp shocks of the uncanny and the pulverised ‘Laughing Tides’ follows the dense crawl of the opening with the sound of steel screeching to a halt; a concrète emittance of high-pitched creaks and groans. Yet the distinction remains. This isn’t a stoic process of annihilatory subversion, this is heavily processed perception warp, a stoned soul picnic without the soul and without the picnic, just an inebriated, freakish assembly with a hotwired soundsystem blaring out the treated emanations of power tools. More zoot friendly than leather lovin’ psychic warfare though I imagine there’d be room for both in this provisional projection.

‘Texas’ offers little relief from such dissonance and haze, with the strangulated noise howls of ‘Laughing Tides’ spilling over into its opening passages and flaring up intermittently throughout. Yet with the crack and whip of FX that sound like pylons short circuiting and the monotonal drub of guitars adding something solid to the ruckus, it feels like the meeting point between the right-on, partly rockist bravado of Undertow and the wrecked Neubaten squall of ‘Laughing Tides’. With it, Undertow begins to settle into the semblance of something stable, even if that stability is rooted in an industrial psychedelia that you feel could easily unravel into volatility at any moment.

On ‘Empty Island’ the unsteady foundations of that stability are just about maintained though not without disorientating threats. Reverberant ricochets of a dub music predicated less on bass weight than on turning the materiality of sound inside out are bedded in a relatively serene, acid-fried atmosphere. If it wasn’t for the mangled solos you could probably kick back and zone out, but the likelihood of that happening becomes less and less realistic as those licks of guitar go evermore south and start making less sense, even to an addled mind. Still even with this later disarray, the pace is unhurried, and the sounds stretched for maximum mindtrip potential. As with the previous ten or so minutes, the infiltration into the world of Undertow – mirrored by an artwork which looks like Felicien Rops if he decided to dabble in horrifically haunting watercolours – is not done by brute force but by a gradual seepage, a leaden but irrepressible spew of atonal clatter and repurposed machine dirge.

If there’s a drawback to Undertow it’s that the stimulating, bruising weirdo stride of the title track isn’t emulated in the excursions into industrial noise, hard-edged psych and experimental dub that follow it. In these moments, it seems the band are seeing how far they can go rather than how hard and dramatic they can hit. Nevertheless, in the anti-heroic spoken word snarls (‘I count every deceit, as they repeat/like receipts of doom’) nauseous lysergic skulk and progressive disintegration of ‘Thirteen’ there’s a sense that these excursions were worth it, necessary parts in a greater whole, bound together by the terminally wired, acrid inculcation of the intro and the SunnO)))-in-a-desert-taking-peyote odyssey that is the outro.

There’s something inevitable about the arrival of a new Wolf Eyes record, yet another noxious notch in a sprawling discography. What’s becoming less certain, as they reach more and more of the uninitiated, is where that record takes them. On Undertow there’s less of the upfront ferocity of previous years but it’s not as if they’re toning anything down, just prolonging the hallucinatory qualities and the twisted, anomalous ardency of their vision. Slower, grimmer, prone to slipping into sidereal currents but still repping a spumescent avant punk noise blowout versed in the temporal black magic of experimental electronics and dub, this isn’t what many would want but this is what many deserve. An unholy and timely acid test for the Trump era. The soundtrack to signing out, getting blasted and letting your head melt.

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Pitchfork 73

“Time is what keeps everything from happening at once.” So declared sci-fi grand poo-bah Ray Cummings in his 1921 short story “The Time Professor,” 76 years before the inception of Wolf Eyes, his theorem’s greatest challengers in music. The clock has long since become subservient to the Detroit trio, at least aesthetically. However prominent a role it may appear to play—monumental song lengths, alternating moments of eerie calm and explosive fury that seem to stretch on for eternity—time’s ultimately rendered obsolete under Wolf Eyes’ crushing gravity. The ever-shifting darkness is all that remains, devoid of any logical metric for measuring the band’s 20-year reign of terror—which, naturally, means everything’s going according to plan.

Or is it? Just over a minute into Wolf Eyes’ new album Undertow, vocalist Nate Young takes the mic for a groggy dispatch from his personal hell, deep beneath the rubble of Motor City. “I spent too much time outside, but it never seemed the same,” he moans on the titular opener, later conceding: “I spent too much time on an answer/Wanting to see if I’d ever grow old.” Permanence, it seems, has become a bit of a chore for him and his pals–and how couldn’t it, considering our ironclad perception of the group as monstrous, restless shape-shifters? Still, Wolf Eyes aren’t about to soften, or worse, surrender to Father Time. With this record, they’re just giving him a little room to breathe. It’s a small gesture that goes a long way.

Like the band’s last long player, 2015’s I Am a Problem: Mind in Pieces, Undertow finds Wolf Eyes a bit tamer than usual, shoehorning their concrète-tinged racket to more conventional melodic paradigms. They’ve mostly done away with the bluesy flirtations this time around, instead applying a wrecking ball to the spacious, lush frameworks of world music, ambient, and even reggae. “Texas” plays out like a new age nightmare, as John Olson’s saxophone stabs into the smoke-shrouded void with skronk after agonizing skronk, electrifying otherwise sedate woodwinds into instruments of war. “Empty Island,” on the other hand, is Wolf Eyes’ dip into dub, presided over by an acrid, guillotine-like riddim (which is also present on the title track, albeit to a slightly lesser extent) and Jim Baljo’s hazy noodling.

Wolf Eyes save their biggest, weirdest statement on Undertow for last with “Thirteen,” a primal epic whose nearly 14-minute runtime comprises more than half of this five-track project. The monolith derives its frisson–or rather, its malaise–from a long, tortuous tug-of-war between Baljo’s guitars and Olsen’s synths, which fall upon the ears with all the grace of a Biblical swarm of cicadas. Young’s protracted moans, meanwhile, accumulate and linger, eventually bleeding into the surrounding soundscape. By the 10-minute mark, the acid trip’s reached its hemorrhaging apex and the trio amble off into the murk, hands clutching tambourines and maracas, wild hearts satiated by maniacally-enabled catharsis.

Drowned In Sound 70

Not, of course, that everything in a discography as massive as Wolf Eyes’ will be to everyone’s taste. Whilst some thought 2015’s certifiably unhinged I Am a Problem: Mind in Pieces was something of a masterstroke, others bemoaned what they interpreted as a decrease in viscerality from the band. Anyone who’s seen Wolf Eyes live in the last few years will know that any such accusation is misleading. Wolf Eyes are no longer as jaggedly vicious on record as they were in their earlier days, but only because they have found more subtle ways to unnerve listeners. Undertow, the debut release on the band’s own new label Lower Floor, is a case in point.

There’s very little in the way of bowel-shredding sonic harshness here, but there is less of the restraint found on its predecessor. The titular opening track is thoroughly menacing, and the mood doesn’t let up throughout the following four tracks. To say Undertow is disturbing would be to misrepresent what’s going on here. This is Wolf Eyes turning a mirror on the grimy world around them rather than trying to goad their audience with unnecessary displays of nightmare trip psychedelia. The one short, sharp shock that this record provides – the exhausting, but sub-two minute, ‘Laughing Tides’ – is an outlier, but one that seems to reflect the sudden outbursts of chaos that afflict contemporary politics.

This is, after all, a band that offered their entire discography for 'Pay-what-you-want' download the day after Donald Trump was elected last November, encouraging donations for appropriate charities instead. Undertow recognises that the familiar can be the most threatening. The cult of misplaced celebrity and of misinformation that dominates America in 2017 is aptly subverted in the 13-minute-closer, ‘Thirteen’, which sounds like a crawl-pace Stooges jam gone badly, badly wrong. “I count every deceit, as they repeat”, Young spits at one juncture. The track as a whole is a deeply unsettling ride, building on the claustrophobic electronics presented in the earlier stages of the record by threatening to deconstruct them altogether.

If there’s one criticism that very much springs to mind this time around it’s that Undertow feels a little slight. Nobody expects a Wolf Eyes record to stick around too long, but aside from ‘Thirteen’ it does feel a little like this album could do with a tad more heft. Certainly, on early listens, it appears to lack some of the strange staying power of the band’s very best releases, as if there’s an indefinable something missing. As a result, this is unlikely to jar experienced Wolf Eyes listeners as much as it is newcomers. One can only hope plenty of new ears are drawn into the band’s orbit through this release.