Wolf Eyes : Burned Mind

You know those brutish ogres that live just below the surface of the earth and come up every now and then to fuck things up for the rest of us? Well, they’ve surfaced, moved to Detroit, brought with them arms full of underworld electronics and decided to start a band under the guise of Wolf Eyes. These three guys trudged their way up to Earth’s surface over a decade ago, and after engaging the more risk taking cave lurkers with dozens of limited run cassette, CD-R and vinyl-only releases, the band is formally introduced to the rest of the world by indie mainstay Sub Pop. They’ll go perfectly alongside Iron & Wine.

The Wolf Eyes experience, live and on record, isn’t so much one of enjoyment for the listener as much as it is a mental endurance test, trying to withstand their brand of spine-shattering sub-sonic death-march music.
This isn’t the album you put on to get the party started, or one you choose when you need to relax. No, this is what you plug into your ears when you’ve decided you’d like to make those little hammer, anvil and stirrups suffer for all the times they’ve caused you to remember the hook from a top 40 radio hit or a mall-punk disaster.

Like the Miami booty-bass hip-hoppers that came before them, Wolf Eyes rely heavily on ultra deep bass tones for this release, the type to make your speakers pop, hum and crackle. Unlike many art-noise contemporaries, Wolf Eyes no longer depend solely on lightning fast beats to guide, or in some cases mask, the direction of their sound. Instead, using droning minimalist drum sounds that lull the listener into a false sense of security they then batter the listener over the head with an onslaught that sounds something like falling asleep with the television on while some unseen entity channel surfs through hundreds of channels of static and white noise, with the volume turned to 11.

Burned Mind, and Wolf Eyes as a whole, can really only be described by their opposition to anything remotely resembling what we aboveground folk call music. Their atonality and disregard for music as pleasure will either have you marveling at their brash sense of chaos inspired risk taking, or disregard them as drug-fueled maniacs engaging in masturbatory self indulgence. I’m sure these Motor City ogres don’t give a fuck either way.

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