Wolf Eyes – Always Wrong

Wolf Eyes

“Out of chaos comes order”.

Oft quoted, oft misquoted and a statement of some pretty, hefty philosophical weight. If we didn’t have chaos, we couldn’t have order. If we didn’t have noise, we probably couldn’t have music.

Chaos is evidently a speciality of Nate Young’s Wolf Eyes project. Judging by their latest release Always Wrong on Hospital Productions, sometime home to fellow eardrum perforators Prurient and Kevin Drumm, the loss of Aaron Dilloway hasn’t particularly dullened the trios love of earsplitting grind and sheet metal fx. No, Always Wrong is not a pleasant listen, and anyone who might have forseen it as such is probably best advised to quit reading now. I wouldn’t want to be wasting your time after all.

The thing with ‘noise’ records is that all too often they are a rather boring reproduction of frighteningly intense live performance. I’d place Merzbow’s tour last year with Carlos Giffoni and Flower-Corsano Duo right up there with the best live experiences I’ve ever had, but besides the latter artist, I don’t routinely make a habit of playing their records in my home. And there’s a reason for that – I lack the equipment to make the experience worthwhile, and partially because of that I can’t (or don’t desire to) recreate the desired atmosphere: oppressive, confusing and completely otherworldly. Pure noise is, for me at least, a live phenomenon.

That said, Always Wrong isn’t an awful record. It’s not a great one either, but it is, for want of a better word, interesting. Undoubtedly, it’s probably not as interesting as their live performances (just how does one play an ‘electrified plank’?), but after a while, it has a certain pull to it. Despite clocking in at just under 30 minutes, the record has an almost pyschedelic feel to it, grimy squalls and casbah drones clambering their way out of the murky industrial dub the collective kick up. It’s listening to some arcane machine shudder and lurch into life, flashes of raw blue electricity igniting as it recovers from some 50 year hangover. This driving clank and clatter, matched with some ear splittingly bizarre tones (I’m pretty certain I picked out what sounded like a didgeridoo in the mix) lends the record the odd sensation of being completely chaotic, yet still heading towards something. When Wolf Eyes get it right – witness the muezzin like clarion calls of ‘Pretend Alive’ or ‘Droll Cut the Dog’ – it is strangely thrilling, hearing something come out of, well, everything.

But, moments like this are too few and far between to make it worthwhile. You get the feeling that Wolf Eyes are a particularly remorseless bunch of misogynists, who long to inflict their own brand of sonic warfare on mankind (witness the track entitled “We All Hate You”), and after repeated listens, it does start to sound like noise for noise’s sake. We’ve seen acts like Skullflower find beauty and ecstasy from chaos, whereas all there is to be found in Wolf Eyes is pain and confusion, two emotions that don’t really have the longevity necessary to really grab the listener. Which is a real shame, because underneath those buzzsaw electronics and clattering percussion of Always Wrong, there does lurk the beating heart of something a bit deeper and cleverer than that.

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