Wolf Eyes – No Matter
I get in trouble, sometimes, for straying from my comfort zone on this blog. Frankly, I find this a little bit baffling. I know we all like to know what we are getting when we do things and so on and so forth, but I would have thought that breaking up the constant stream of similar music on a site like this would be a good thing.
Anyhow, Wolf Eyes is sufficiently different that I am not really going to be able to review it, just to say that it is there and that I actually think I rather like it. When I played some on the Fresh Air Radio show Ruth genuinely didn’t believe that I would sit and listen to this, and in a sense she is right.
This is quite harsh noise music (by the standards of this website), so I do not, for example, pour a nice glass of wine, open a book and play this record. In fact, I am not really entirely sure how to relate to it, because I don’t really listen to music like this very much at all, so I have next to no context for understanding it properly. They get involved in art shows and stuff like that as well, so it seems like I am listening to one element of a broader work, in isolation, which may not be how the band would ideally like the music to be approached.
Nevertheless, there is something about this I find myself really enjoying – or at the very least, something I find myself fascinated by. Apparently Wolf Eyes get a little criticism for not being a real noise band, and they are easy enough on the ear to have been released on Sub Pop at times in the past, and it is quite possible that they are therefore a little closer to mainstream or conventional pop than a lot of the purists of their genre, but I don’t really know enough about it to say.
All I can say is that in amongst all the weird noises on this record there is something which I seem to find really rather good, but being such a different kind of music for me, I could no more tell you what that is than I could fly to the moon.
Wolf Eyes – Track 01
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1 comment LOL!
I love wolfeyes I seen em live one night at the venue and they were great, If a bit quiet but I just had my ears killed by mogwai at the usher hall. You heard urine burn thats a good song!
I’ve had a soft spot for Wolf eyes for a long time. I first came across them thanks to Drew Wounded Knee when he asked me to bring back a copy of their seminal ‘Stabbed In The Face’ single from America if I could find it. I could and I did. Perhaps tellingly to the noise purists, I found it in the Virgin Megastore in Times Square.
Some of their stuff is far more mental than this, and I guess there are also other noise acts like Japan’s Merzbow and Scotland’s Kylie Minoise who are far harder on the ear.
Well if this wasn’t the gentler end of the spectrum then I doubt I would be able to enjoy it. Sometimes you need a slightly easier introduction to a style of music, or it can be far too easy to just glaze over.