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[Noise] Wolf Eyes Burned Mind

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Killer album, ~237 VBR except for the last track which is 192 CBR.

Track Listing:

1. Dead in a Boat
2. Stabbed in the Face
3. Reaper's Gong
4. Village Oblivia
5. Urine Burn
6. Rattlesnake Shake
7. Burned Mind
8. Ancient Delay
9. Black Vomit
10. Untitled

All Music Guide Album Pick 4/5 Stars: Wolf Eyes remains one of the most prominent groups in the noise scene of the 2000s with Burned Mind, their first full-length for Sub Pop. Being on a bigger label means more opportunity for listeners to have their ears and brains reformatted by the trio's alternately suffocating and spare electronic-based works, and they make the most of it: Burned Mind upholds Wolf Eyes' reputation for making truly unnerving music. Building on the harsh, wintry blasts of Dread and, especially, Dead Hills, the album is also Wolf Eyes' most cleanly recorded work yet. That's not to say that Burned Mind isn't very, very heavy on the noise; it's just that the negative space around the band's onslaughts is carved away more clearly (which they take to an extreme by burying one of the album's eeriest pieces behind three blank tracks). Wolf Eyes' mastery of dead calm as well as brutal sounds underscore that noise music can and should be as much about texture and restraint as it is about volume. Throughout Burned Mind, the band strikes an uneasy balance between eerie, atmospheric interludes and full-fledged pieces. "Dead in a Boat" begins the album with slowly building, ice-burned tones that sound like static overshadowing distant screams, setting the stage for "Stabbed in the Face," which was released as a single earlier in 2004. Nate Young's possessed howls are even more enmeshed with the buzzsaw electronics surrounding him, and the track's relentlessly, well, stabbing bass brings Wolf Eyes' industrial and dub influences to the fore. The wonderfully named "Village Oblivia" and "Rattlesnake Shake" -- which, with its aptly rattling bursts of percussion and odd, whistling drones, achieves a terrifying almost-beauty -- are both strong pieces, but Burned Mind's most cohesive moments arrive at the end of the album. The final three tracks feel like movements of a larger piece: "Burned Mind"'s searing, high-pitched tones give way to the zombie-like pace of "Ancient Delay"'s bass pulses, which attain a tribal, hypnotic feel on "Black Vomit" before the album's final noise climax is unleashed. Burned Mind isn't just Wolf Eyes' most cohesive album yet, it's also their most accessible (well, as accessible as music this intentionally unsettling can be), which makes it equally satisfying for those just discovering the band and those already converted by Wolf Eyes' fascinatingly ugly sounds.

Pitchfork 8.0/10: Music should not make you want to die. If a record ever successfully achieved such an effect, my sincere hope is that it would be summarily taken off the market and marked for burial at a nuclear waste site. But while few bands are truly capable of inducing such crisis, an unprepared listener's response to abstract, texture-based noise music, like that of Wolf Eyes, will often run something like this:

"This makes me want to kill myself."

With songs like "Burn Your House Down" and "Let the Smoke Rise", Wolf Eyes have doubtless left many craving a fistful of aspirin and a glass of water, but these Michigan noisters' brazen electro-industrial soundscapes have yet to provoke any suicides. Dauntingly abrasive, yes; spiritually violating, no: Wolf Eyes are hyperbole-inducing provocateurs whose scalding compositions never fail to get a rise out of unsuspecting bystanders. And that's part of what makes them so appealing/appalling.

Which raises the inevitable cynical question: Do Wolf Eyes have any actual fans, or just the ever-fickle appreciators, grazers, and gimmick seekers?

This collection has been likened to an art project, and that's an unjust charge. Burned Mind doesn't belong in a museum (where it may well garner glowing reviews), though it does answer to the trove of obnoxious descriptors typically foisted upon music of its stripe: dense, abstract, challenging, and confrontational. But more often than not, Wolf Eyes are on your side: Enlist them to kick your meek ass, and they're happy to oblige. The mesmeric, chainsaw guitar rips of "Reaper's Gong" are nothing if not galvanizing, while the plodding saw-synth tsunami of "Stabbed in the Face" is downright debilitating.

Songs like this might make some want to harm themselves, but can for others offer a quick syringe of adrenaline, or provoke a meditative look inward at a dark stratum of emotions, chief among them frustration, anger, and an overwhelming sense of imminent peril. In fact, much of Burned Mind sounds as if it were scored for a late-21st century update of The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, where the villain is actually an indefatigable android gone haywire.

The opening 45 seconds of "Dead in a Boat" may suggest a quieter, less volatile beast than was present on previous records like Dead Hills and Slicer, but those notions are quickly dispelled as the silence is broken by a wave of electronic squall. The introduction grows more misleading with the next track, "Stabbed in the Face", which features a looped female scream over a heady milieu of feedback and grating pitch-bends. One of the most uncompromisingly and mesmerically abrasive tracks in recent memory, it's easily Burned Mind's crown jewel, and a serviceable mission statement for a band who explore noise not for gimmickry or shock-value, but because that's the mode in which they express themselves best.

This is by far Wolf Eyes' most visceral release to date. The masochistic appeal of stertorous noise and the comely allure of pop music are one in the same: Burned Mind, like any pop album worth its salt, conjures a deeper realm of images and moods beyond its surface qualities. Beneath the shock value of these overwhelming sonic miasmas are unambiguous aural parables about a world gone awry, and technology is held as the main culprit. Song titles like "Dead in a Boat", "Urine Burn", and "Black Vomit" are just faades (if not entirely inaccurate ones), indicative of the arid landscapes of human squalor and degradation stretching open behind. The rusty swingset shrieks of the interminable title track evoke images of spiritless machinery at work, as the band pummel with an admirable dearth of humanity.

Superficially, there's only so much that can be said about Burned Mind that hasn't already been belabored into irrelevance and bought Wolf Eyes curt dismissals. Of course, their style is, to a degree, old news; there are manifold precedents for this breed of unrelenting stridency, dating back to Lou Reed's infamous Metal Music Machine. Throbbing Gristle took a similar stance against technology and industry in the 1970s, and their influence is certainly echoed here. If Wolf Eyes stand out from the legacy of doomsayers that includes Throbbing Gristle, Suicide, Whitehouse, and more recently Yellow Swans, it's because they're impressively, expertly abrasive. The shear inertia of these songs is sufficient to make most self-styled hardcore kids recoil in terror. Burned Mind, better than any recent album I can think of, betrays music's implied purpose of providing an enjoyable aural experience, while at the same time being psychologically compelling and richly imagistic enough to invite repeat listens.

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